by L J McIntyre
Dozens and dozens of voices, male and female, merged into one dreadful wail that repeats over and over again.
“Yeep, yeep.”
“Yeep, yeep.”
They step forward in unison.
“Yeep, yeep.”
“Yeep, yeep.”
I look ahead at the empty street, and push down on the accelerator. In the rear-view mirror I watch the sea of faces as they watch me, until eventually they fade to black as the car lights move too far away. Their yeeping screams fade too.
I look ahead, switch to high beam lights, and drive out of Nesgrove, my sweaty hands slipping on the steering wheel. On the bumpy road I see the remains of the rabbit corpse, and shortly after I near the turn off for the trail to the lake. I slow down, stop the car, contemplate getting out.
I look into the darkness of the narrow road and wonder what lives in the forest, what has given so much fear to the locals, and why on earth they thought I could confront the thing. Right here, right now, this is the true event horizon.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted. I’d finally know the truth. I shake my head. I have no idea why I’m in Betsy right now. I don’t know why they returned the car so easily, how I’m so close to safety’s grasp after days of imprisonment. I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth, though.
I slip back into first, put my foot down and speed away from Nesgrove.
Chapter Fifty Five
Two children run and play in the soft, golden light that washes through one of the large re-enforced windows of London’s Gatwick airport.
The boy stops at the window, presses his finger against the glass. “That’s the biggest plane.”
The little girl joins him, points to a nearby plane parked up on the tarmac. “Yeah, but that’s the smallest one.”
“Come on, kids, we’re running late,” their mother calls as she herds their suitcases together.
A hot latte in hand, I wander over to the bookstore, stroll from shelf to shelf. The same emotionless tone of voice you hear in every airport calls across the speaker system, “Flight BA6321 to Queenstown will be boarding at gate twelve at 2:15.”
I find myself in front of the True Crime section, as I’ve often done in random bookstores this past year. It takes barely a second to pick out the book I’m looking for. I know its cover off by heart. I know its story even more intricately because it’s my story, a story I lived for three days. Two years have passed since I sped out of Nesgrove one breezy night but I remember every minute as if it were yesterday. The front cover of the book reads, ‘Nightmare of Nesgrove by Jack Coulson’.
Throughout that whole murky journey in Nesgrove I’d had snippets of insights, little revealing thoughts that had dangled at the tip of my tongue, but not quite touching it enough to figure out what was truly happening in the town. I’d been close, and some things had started to crystallise in my mind, but I was still missing a few key pieces that would draw the grotesque image in its entirety.
A week after leaving Nesgrove I was back in England, sitting in a café, watching birds flitter from table to table in search of crumbs, and everything suddenly fell into place. I was hit with the truth of what had really happened. The key to everything was the Marksons.
I was angry at first. Furious, actually. I had no career, was staying in Ethan’s spare room, and money was growing tighter by the day. Empowered by a new stand your ground attitude, I became a man possessed. For weeks I filed complaints with every governing body in New Zealand that I could. I wanted the Nesgrovians to pay for what they did to me. I pushed and badgered everyone I could speak to in order to push forward with my complaints. In the end, every single inquiry drew a blank. Not a shred of evidence, they all told me.
According to a legal representative I tried to hire, the tale was too unbelievable, too farfetched, and I had no legal grounds to bring the town to court. The newspapers said the same thing. Without any evidence, I was just an online loser trying to save a career in tatters. Even Sally Adams, the girl in the lake, was found by the Queenstown coroner to have died by suicide. She’d drowned in the lake after a heavy dose of heroin. There was no murder.
Left to stew in my own self-pity and anger, I decided once again to make a stand. I sat in Ethan’s kitchen one evening, a half drunk glass of wine next to a second hand laptop I’d picked up, a blank page in Microsoft Word staring at me.
My fingers were frozen over the keyboard. I could hear my dad laughing at me, telling me I was a talentless writer. I closed my eyes, took a breath and thought of Gerald Lithglow. My fingers stretched out. I leaned forward, exhaled and started typing. I wrote everything that had happened. Every little detail. The world needed to know.
But as the days of writing blurrily swished by, something completely unexpected happened. Around the last few chapters, I realised anger was no longer fuelling my frantic key strokes. Over the hours and weeks, the anger had subtly faded away. It had been replaced by a very foreign sense of purpose. Each day, hunched over my laptop, I was losing myself in my writing, finding pleasure once again in the written word, discovering a confidence that my dad had robbed of me years ago.
The further away the anger receded, the more I was able to remove myself from the Nesgrove narrative, from the story I’d lived. From start to finish, I wrote the entire book in a month. One morning I said goodbye to Ethan as he went off to work. I brewed a cup of tea, got back into bed and under the quilt, and I read the manuscript front to back in one sitting. I was left utterly bewildered by the overpowering pity I felt for the townsfolk of Nesgrove.
They’d suffered. That was their truth. And sitting in the luxury of a wealthy city, every opportunity afforded me, hospital just down the road, local jobs advertised in windows and online, I could see their plight more clearly.
After that, I did the only thing I could do—I edited the book, removed anything that would give away the town’s motivations. Ethan forwarded the finished manuscript to two agents he knew. A year later the book was on the shelves and by some miracle it attracted a reasonable audience thanks to a few strong reviews from influential bloggers.
The fact is, of those who have purchased and read the book, none will know the truth, the real reasons behind my entrapment. I made sure of that. The online forums might be buzzing with theories, but the truth will never be confirmed. At least, not by me.
I pick up the book from the shelf, run my finger across the front cover, flip it over, read the blurb for the thousandth time. I flip to a random page, my eyes skip along a few sentences, then I close the book, hold it in both hands and imagine my mother smiling with joy. I did it, mum. I wrote a book.
“Flight BA6321 to Queenstown is now boarding at gate twelve.”
I place the book back on the shelf, grab my bags and join the flow of people hurrying to their gates. I sip the last of the latte and toss the cup in the bin before joining the line to board the plane.
It was a Tuesday morning when I told Ethan I was going back to Nesgrove. I know the exact day because it was the same morning I’d gotten the keys for my new gallery. Once I’d received my first royalty payment for the book—a depressingly small sum—I put down a deposit for the gallery which sits on Tynemouth Village front street, close to my apartment. The front window of the gallery is large and makes the perfect viewing platform for passers-by who want to catch a glimpse of the carefully selected images hanging up on white walls. I decided I didn’t need social media to have a photography career. I deleted Facebook.
The gallery has a little office out back where I like to write in the evenings. Above my wooden desk is a photo printed from my phone, the same phone I had with me in Nesgrove. I found it stashed in a cubby by Betsy’s steering wheel. The photo is the symbol of forgiveness seen around Nesgrove: the triangle and open hand from the sign at the side of the highway. By the photo hangs the carved necklace Tamati gave me.
In the evening’s when I write, the office is lit by a single golden glow from a small lamp which sometimes flickers for no
reason. And when it flickers I often wonder what the Nesgrovians are doing, what Annie is doing, where Betsy is after I abandoned her in Queenstown airport.
Ethan was standing in the empty gallery, looking out the window, when I told him I needed to go back to the cabin, see it for myself. I laughed when he stared at me with his mouth open.
“You can’t be serious,” he said.
“Deadly,” I responded with a joke.
“But—”
“Listen, Ethan, I’ll be safe. You know that. You’re one of the few people who know the truth.”
“Your truth, Jack. You haven’t actually confirmed the story with anyone there. You don’t know that they’re not raving lunatics.”
“I do. I’m certain of it.”
“But you’re flying all the way there just to go to a cabin?”
“No, I’ll be in New Zealand for a few book signings. I’ll just be in Nesgrove one day.”
He eyed me silently.
“Ethan.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “I know I’ve said it before, but you’re a good friend. The best, in fact—”
“Come on now. Enough of—”
“No, I mean it. I owe you more than you realise.”
He shook his head, said I was as crazy as the Nesgrove lot. He even offered to come with me. I told him I’d prefer to go alone, that this was something I wanted to do by myself.
When I first got back to England, I called Dr Randel and asked if we could have regular sessions again. They’ve helped a lot. I still get bouts of anxiety occasionally, but can go weeks without an episode and handle them a lot more effectively than I used to. The anxiety pills are a thing of the past, thank god. And now, standing in line at the airport, I feel no apprehension about returning to Nesgrove.
I hand the flight attendant my boarding pass which he scans and hands back to me. I take my seat, lift the window shutter, and steal a few more looks at England before the plane starts moving forward.
Chapter Fifty Six
The green New Zealand countryside reels outside my window as I drive down the highway toward Nesgrove in my rental car. The sky is deep blue and the morning sun casts a harsh light on the road ahead. As the GPS takes me closer to the town, my stomach plays host to a swarm of butterflies, and my hands grow clammy.
I remind myself of the moments when I caught a glimpse of the true Nesgrove, when I snuck a peek behind the curtain and saw Maggie crying at the grave. And my saviour, the farmer who’d dragged away the skinhead: that laugh I heard from him while working with his son, the way he smiled at the boy, that was absolute love and tenderness from a father to his son. I know because I never had that. Instead I’d watched other dads smile like that at their sons. In those moments I was witnessing Nesgrove in the flesh.
When I think of the town, I see this haunting spread of fragile houses and decay, but I’m reminded once more of Maggie, that very first day I arrived in Nesgrove, she’d applied too much makeup, too much lipstick. She was nervous because I was coming to town. It had been about six months since the Marksons were in Nesgrove, six months for the townsfolk to come up with this whole idea. But all the actors, all the Nesgrovians involved, only had two weeks to prepare for their final roles because that’s how long it was between me writing on Facebook about my plan to visit Nesgrove and me arriving at the town.
It would appear Maggie had had stage fright and sat rigidly when I’d spoken to her for the first time because why wouldn’t she? She wasn’t an actor, she didn’t know how to deliver a natural line. She had done what we all would have done: acted terribly.
And the boy working in the café, he’d spurted out his line wrong, then looked at the other customer in the room because he was worried that he’d have given up the goose.
They were all just people, frightened, nervous, fragile. No monsters there. Time has taught me that.
I failed to see all of this, all of the obvious signs that none of it was real, for one reason and one reason alone: I was primed to see the Nesgrovians as monsters. I’d been doing that to strangers my entire life and Nesgrove was no different.
Everyone else in the town who’d completely ignored me, they didn’t have any lines. They’d been told to ignore me and that was it. Much easier than writing hundreds of individual parts.
And Annie, she’d been my guide, cared for me while also looking out for everyone else, so soon after the death of her best friend, Sally. Annie’s grief was more real than anything else in the town. I can’t imagine the emotional toll it must have taken on her to perform her tasks the way she did. I’m most nervous about seeing Annie again, if she’s still in Nesgrove.
I see the sign for Nesgrove and turn off onto the familiar two-lane road. Barrelling toward me in the adjacent lane, a giant cloud of dust in its trail, is a wide tourist bus with Chinese writing on the front. I edge the car closer to the side of the road, inch onto the stony shoulder. The bus doesn’t slow down or move along. It continues to hog more than its fair share of the road, before charging past me, pelting little stones off my window.
I move back onto the road just as I see the sign for Lake Fisher. I continue driving along the bumpy road, and that’s when I sight the farmer’s field to my right. I slow down, try to see how closely the images of Nesgrove in my mind match the reality.
There are cows and sheep grazing on a paddock of green. I see the farmer himself up ahead, leaning against a fence with a hot drink in his hand. He has his back to me just metres away. He’s every bit as broad and tall as I remember. His head twitches left as if listening to something. He stands up from the fence and turns around. Our eyes meet. He brings the mug to his mouth, takes a sip, lowers the mug again, and nods at me. I nod back.
I drive past the petrol station and see the one-armed man I attacked stacking shelves inside with headphones on, bopping his head. The main street of Nesgrove is almost unchanged apart from a few tourists. A family, all dressed in shorts and brightly coloured T-shirts, is standing in front of the Devil’s Breath pub having their photos taken. A group of young hipsters fall out of the convenience store, laughing and joking with each other. The café has been refurbished and I smile when I see the establishment’s new name above the door: Nice and Goldeny.
Your Motel looks every bit as run-down as it was. I swing the car into the car park which has two other cars parked near the reception. There’s a sign saying ‘Parking is for guests only.’ I look up at room 218, my room. The window has since been fixed, and stuck to it is a sheet of cardboard. On the cardboard is written in black marker, ‘Permanently Occupied.’
Nice touch.
I open the door to the reception. Maggie is standing up and flicking through a magazine. She looks up at me, looks down at the magazine, looks up again, her eyes wide open.
“Hi, Maggie. Remember me?”
She manages a cautious smile. “Welcome back, Jack.” Her hands fiddle nervously on the desk.
“Is it okay if I use the motel car park? I won’t be here long.”
“Of course, it is. Y-you look well, Jack.”
“You, too.”
I leave the reception with an odd sensation. I’d prepared myself for the possibility that my mind might start reliving the nightmare I thought I was in two years ago. I expected to be nervous speaking to Maggie, but I wasn’t. Not even a little bit. It was almost like talking with an old friend.
I walk past the convenience store, up a street that opens up to the hanging tree field. Three people are standing in front of the tree, arms across each other’s shoulders, big smiles, while a fourth takes their photo.
I approach a house opposite the tree, creak open the little white gate, walk up to the front door and knock three times. Gerald Lithglow opens the door with a large white smile. He offers me his hand which I shake firmly.
“I heard you were back in town.”
“News travels fast.”
He nods. “I’m glad you came. Come on in.”
The pink and white floral wallpaper of h
is living room walls is barely visible for the dozens, hundreds maybe, of photos and posters neatly hanging up.
“Would you like a drink?” he asks.
“I’d love a glass of water, please.”
I run my eyes over the images. Many of them show a younger Gerald with a woman who I assume was Libby, his wife. They look like kids in love. The posters are mainly of theatre productions in Auckland. ‘Starring Gerald Lithglow’ one says.
“Ah, yes,” Gerald says as he enters the room and hands me a glass. He looks nostalgically at the posters. “Libby was in that play, too. Just a small part. She was never particularly confident on stage.” His eyes move over to a photo of the two of them hugging in front of a beach hut surrounded by white sand.
He turns to me. “How did you figure it out, Jack?”
I take a sip of water and point to a poster next to a bookshelf.
“Of course. Eventually the truth will out.”
The poster shows someone dressed in Victorian style clothing and a sinister smile, standing by a thick wooden door. The text above reads, ‘Experience Marksons Travelling Escape Room’.
“Let me just say, Jack, and this comes from everyone, not just me, that we’re genuinely sorry for the pain we caused you. It was never meant to go that far. We were desperate and had no idea you were as stubborn as a mule.”
“I figured as much.”
“And by the same token, on behalf of everyone in Nesgrove, thank you.”
I nod.
“When you drove away that night, we thought we’d failed. The article in the Liberty online paper might have helped a little, but we were sure we’d missed our only real chance. And then your book came out. Well…we feared the worst. The little that remained of Ben’s hair almost fell out with worry. But I must say, you surprised us all.” He points to his brown leather sofa. “Please, sit.”
I sit down and place my drink on the side table.
“Tell me how you figured it all out.”
He takes a seat next to me.
