by Jacob Strunk
He recognizes Rokes House immediately, looming over the town from its perch high on the hill, although it couldn’t look more different. He followed the GPS directions without even thinking, turning here and merging there, and it’s only as he directs the rented Mercedes onto the long, winding drive – realizing where he’s headed – that he notes the place looks somehow even more ominous now in the afternoon light, with its black paint and tall windows like eyes. He parks near the front door and looks up, all the way up to the attic dormer. It seems a lifetime ago he crept up the creaking stairs to that window, flashlight in one trembling hand, to peer out into the night.
He takes his sunglasses off as he approaches the front desk, dings the bell for service. He takes in the entryway, the broad staircase, the sparkling fixtures and new varnish. After a moment, a young woman arrives. She can’t be more than 20, he thinks.
“Do you have a reservation?”
“Should be under Alan Mears.”
She types, then looks up and asks, “The actor?”
“That’s me.” He smiles. She squints.
“Yeah. My grandma’s a big fan. I’ve seen you on magazines at her house.”
“Tell your grandmother I said hi.” He puts his card down and receives a key to the suite on the third floor. He assures her he doesn’t need help with his one bag and heads up. The hallways are brighter than he remembers, of course, and there’s no sign of the raccoons and possums that for years were the house’s only full-time occupants. He steps carefully where he remembers a splintered hole in the floorboards, runs his fingers along the new wallpaper. They really did do an exceptional job. You’d never know.
He stops outside his room, key in hand, and looks down the hallway. The door to the attic is closed. He takes a step toward it, then pauses again, remembers the thrill of being somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, remembers the excitement when they first found the unlocked bulkhead into the cellar. He thinks if he closed his eyes he could go back there, so vivid is the sense memory of being in this place, so familiar after so many years. Decades. He almost feels the dust tickling his sinuses.
“Mr. Mears.” He starts at the sound of his name and turns to see a thin man in a shiny suit. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m Gavin Finch, proprietor.”
“Mr. Finch. I am in awe of the job you’ve done on the old girl.” He shakes Finch’s hand. It’s warm, dry; the skin feels as thin as tissue paper, as if it could tear if he’s not careful.
“Thank you, and thank you for spending your visit with us. You’ll be the first paying customer in the new suite. We just had our soft opening last month.”
“Timing couldn’t have been better for me.”
“Well, I’ve leave you to get settled. If you need anything, you may ask for me personally. I’ve been spending many nights here myself in the run up to our opening.” Finch turns to go.
“One thing,” Alan says. Finch smiles imploringly. “Where can a guy get a burger and a beer around here these days?”
An hour later, Alan’s looking out across the river. The big, fancy houses he remembers from childhood lining the north shore are now barricaded behind concrete levees. The river’s been eating away at its own banks, a few more bites each year. He couldn’t remember more than one or two spring floods as a kid, but now it’s an annual battle of wills, a tug of war with the spring melt and summer storms.
He leaves the Mercedes in a municipal lot and steps out onto North Street, Granville’s main drag. It’s the end of summer, and he expects to see kids spilling out of the comic book shop, fixing the chains on their bikes in the alley behind the Chinese place. But the comic book shop is now a mortgage broker, the Chinese place vacant with a faded For Lease sign in the front window. He’s the only person in either direction on the downtown sidewalk. He might be the only person on foot in the entire county. At the end of the block he turns south down the narrow alley where he smoked his first cigarette a lifetime ago. It spills him into a parking lot, now part of the expanded credit union. On the other side of the lot, nestled among some ancient oaks below the railroad trestle, he sees the dirty white aluminum siding of Harry’s, an old farmhouse turned tavern, and his first pedestrians – three men about his age or a little older, all grey in the beard and at the temples, stubbing cigarettes out in the ashtray beside the front door. He follows them in.
The place hasn’t changed a bit. It even smells the same; decades of cigarette smoke, sweat, spilled beer. It’s gotta be in the very wood itself, he thinks, sliding onto a stool at the end of the bar. He’s leaning forward, squinting at the labels on the taps, when he’s startled by a disembodied voice for the second time that day.
“This bar’s for locals only, fella.” Alan spins in his seat to face a broad, tall woman, her tattooed arms terminating in hands planted firmly on her wide hips. She glares down at him, but can’t keep it up. She breaks, laughing, and all at once he recognizes her smile.
“Maggie, holy hell.” He stands, hugs her. She picks up a tray of empty glasses she’d set on the table beside her and carries them behind the bar. He orders a Heineken. She gives him hell for it, puts in his burger order, and then pours them each a shot of Wild Turkey.
“Welcome home, old timer.” He downs the whiskey, grimaces. “Little out of practice, huh?” She drops the shot glasses into a bin behind the bar.
“My palate’s evolved,” he jokes.
“Right, big movie star. You’re probably used to Cristal.”
“Hardly.”
“Oh? Dom? Hennessy?”
“I mean hardly a star. I pay the bills. Small screen, big pond.”
“Your brother know you’re in town?” Alan shakes his head, downs the last of his Heineken. She nods; he doesn’t need to say more. She pours him another Heineken. “What about Jess?”
“I, no, not yet. Need to call her. I kind of came in under the radar.”
“No, shit, man.” She sets a burger, medium rare, in front of him. “Glad I caught a glimpse. Like a bigfoot sighting. But don’t worry, I won’t sell it to the tabloids.”
“Thanks.”
“Or Soap Opera Digest.” Alan laughs. Maggie does, too.
He takes the long way home, winding along the river up through farm fields and one-light towns. He pulls over on the broad shoulder and leans against the car. Out in the river, he sees fish breaking the surface, jumping to catch the insects that buzz along the water. Downriver, he sees two guys drinking beer and casting from a flat-bottom duck boat.
He stops at a country bar, gets a six-pack to go.
Back in his room, he opens a beer. Then his laptop. He sees new messages from his agent, his lawyer. A notification pops on screen from the custody app the mediator made him and Cindy both download, all communication monitored by the court. He drains half the beer, shuts the laptop. He sits on the bed, scooting up to lean his shoulders on the headboard. A pang of guilt blooms, and he kicks his shoes off onto the floor, making fists with his toes. It suddenly dawns on him how long the day’s been, how he was at LAX at 5:30 that morning, then into Chicago, and then a wild notion overtook him and he turned north onto I-94 instead of heading south into Oak Park. Why not, he’d thought, texting his assistant to book him a room.
He finishes the beer, opens another. He walks the perimeter of the suite, feeling the thick pile of the rug squish beneath his socks. He toys with the idea of taking a soak in the ornate clawfoot tub. Then something occurs to him.
Alan quietly opens the door to the hallway and pokes his head out, listens intently. He can hear faint sounds of life from far below, but up here on the third floor, he is alone. After a moment, sure he’s not going to bump into another guest and that Finch is not lying in wait around the corner, he steps out into the hallway. He sneaks in his stocking feet toward the door to the attic. He pauses at the top of the stairs, sips his beer, then continues on. He stops in front of the door, and a wave of that same dangerous excitement he felt as a child wells up in him.
It’s been over thirty years since he willed himself up those creaky stairs in his Batman shirt, one hand holding a flashlight, the other gripping tightly a rickety rail. He’d been alone up here, his brother’s voice echoing from the first floor, Jess’s laughter answering it. He’d followed the stairs up into the dark must of the attic, steeling himself against the fluttering of wings from derelict rooms elsewhere in the expansive house. And he was alone at the top, too, creeping to the window and staring out at the twinkling lights of town across the black wash of the night. Alone at the top. Until he wasn’t.
“Jesus,” Alan says aloud. He realizes his hand is reaching out, almost touching the knob. He shakes his head, sips his beer, and turns to walk back to his room. “Nope nope nope.” He locks the door to his room, decides he’ll take that soak after all. He fills the tub, opening a third beer. He sets his phone carefully on the soap dish as he sinks into the water, once again reminded he is exhausted. He hadn’t realized how sore his body was, how tightly wound he’d been all day. The water begins to draw some of the ache away, and after a few minutes, Alan scrolls through his contacts and raises the phone to his hear.
“Hey,” he says. “You’ll never guess where I’m calling from.”
The next morning he parks the Mercedes on a tree lined street he and his brother used to race down on their bikes. He’s not sure he remembers the house at first, but it comes back to him as he walks up the front step. An older couple lived here. Then later just an elderly woman. She’d hand out apples to trick or treaters, a surefire way to burn an indelible memory into a kid’s mind.
Alan slides his phone into Do Not Disturb and raises his hand to knock, but the front door is already swinging open.
“Hey, you.”
“Hey, you back,” Alan says as Jess pushes open the screen door and steps into his arms.
“You smell the same,” she says. It’s nice, their arms around each other, like coming home. Inside she pours them both an iced tea. There’s a stillness in the house that’s palpable. An emptiness. Jess gives him the ten cent tour. They laugh at pictures of Jess and her older sisters as kids. Alan notes the dark squares on the wallpaper where once hung wedding photos. There’s one framed photo on the mantel of Jess, handsome husband whose name Alan can’t remember, their son; all three smiling.
Halfway down the hall they pause, and Alan sees the slightest recoil in Jess, an electric field around the closed bedroom door. He knows it must be Grady’s room, and he feels the urge to say something, to offer some comfort.
But after the briefest of moments, Jess says, “Come on, let me show you the garden.” She points to dozens of tomatoes that will be ripe within days, jokes about giving away zucchini to everyone she knows and still having to put baskets at the sidewalk imploring people to take some. A swing set rusts in one corner of the yard. The grass needs mowing. But everything is vibrant and full of color, and Alan means it when he says it’s lovely.
“So how’s that spooky old house?” Jess asks, sinking into a lawn chair on the patio.
“Not so spooky these days.” Alan sits in a chair beside her. He notices for the first time the fine web of lines around her mouth, the grey wisps at her temples, wrinkles that crease around her eyes when she smiles. He always thought she was beautiful. He still does.
“No ghosts in the attic?” Alan laughs nervously. “It was a big ta-doo, that place. Zoning commission meetings for years, a referendum on the ballet. Lots of folks, it seems like they’d rather let the place fall in on itself than invite some big city developer in.”
“Why does that sound exactly like the Granville I grew up in?”
“Well, small towns, small ponds. Big fish make lots of waves.”
“How many generations of kids risked tetanus breaking into that place, you think?”
Jess laughs and says, “Honestly shocked none of us got rabies. You remember when Kyle spooked that raccoon in the basement? How he howled. And you laughed so hard you peed your damn pants.”
“They did a remarkable job. You should swing by and check it out. I’m here another night.”
Jess nods, lets the moment settle, then – “You see Kyle yet?”
“No.”
“He’s still in your folks’ place in town, yeah?”
“Last I heard.” Alan knew the questions would come. He doesn’t have answers for them, and so he’s grateful when Jess speaks again.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she says, and they’re both already getting up out of the lawn chairs.
It’s just a few blocks from Jess’s house to the boardwalk along the river downtown. Alan remarks on the lack of pedestrians, kids on bikes, general summer traffic.
“Not much happening downtown these days,” she says. “Once they put in the Applebee’s out by the interstate, that was all she wrote. I’m sure you noticed half the storefronts are empty, and next year they start taking buildings down. With the bypass, no one even really drives through here anymore. Why do you think developers eyeballed some haunted ass house falling down a hill? Soon it’ll be all golf courses and conference centers out there. While here…” She waves her hand in the direction of the half-forgotten shops of downtown Granville.
“Can’t stand in the way of progress,”Alan says, his voice a shrug.
“I guess not.”
They follow the boardwalk up to where it ends, a paved sidewalk curving back toward North Street and a dirt trail pushing through the trees along the river. Jess takes his hand, gently, briefly, and pulls him down the trail. He follows, walking carefully behind her, and the trail takes them up through the trees, onto the bluff that overlooks downtown. He sees there the gate to the cemetery, and for just the smallest moment, he senses Jess pause again, push against some invisible wall he can’t even imagine. But then she takes his hand once more, and she breaches the force field, and they step through the gates.
They’re both on auto pilot, it seems to him, and neither speaks. He can tell from her gait she’s walked this a thousand times. Her head down, she seems to glide as if on rails. Around him, Alan feels the arms of remembrance encircling him. Over there is where he caught a garter snake, held it out front of him to scare Jess, threw it arcing through the air toward his brother; it hit the ground and shot like black lightning under the shrubs beside a mausoleum. On that rise to the north, Alan knows, is buried little Ronnie Ducker, who drowned on the Fourth of July. He was Kyle’s age, and their parents stood with them at the funeral, walked with the boys up to the open casket. They all peered in together at Ronnie’s features, bloated and grey and unrecognizable, his hands weirdly pink and crossed over his belly. Then they drove slowly through town in a line of cars and wound up the hill, where Alan and his brother watched Ronnie’s tiny casket lowered into the earth.
He nearly runs into Jess, who has stopped, and he’s brought back from his reminiscence to find her kneeling into a crouch, her hand reaching out to touch a stone. He lowers himself beside her, his knees cracking, and puts a hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t seem to notice. He wonders for a moment if she even knows he’s there. Then she turns to him and offers a smile.
“We really appreciated what you did.”
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t be here. I –”
She cuts him off: “We understood. I understood. The scholarship is still going, you know. Every year now for the past four years. They announce the winners in the paper.” She looks back down at the stone. “It’s a way to keep his name alive. I don’t know if I ever thanked you.” He squeezes her shoulder, and they stay like that for awhile, low to the ground.
“You’re gonna have to help me up,” she says.
“I was going to say the same thing. We might be stuck like this.” And somehow, grunting and creaking, they both manage to stand.
“I remember that being easier,” Jess says. She’s still looking down at the stone. Somehow their hands are linked again, but Alan doesn’t remember either of them reaching out.
“Hey,” Alan says, squeezing her hand. She turns to look, and he nods down the bluff, toward the river.
They make their way carefully down an ancient footpath, each of them nearly falling more than once, laughing at the way their bodies seem to betray them with each step, at how their joints seem to already be stiffening as they stumble down to the water’s edge.
“Hey, there!” the kid says, finally noticing them as Jess grabs Alan’s arm to keep him from falling over into the shallow water. The muck at the river’s edge smells like fish, decay, something else. “Watch your step!”
“Thanks,” Alan says. The kid’s a few yards offshore standing on an exposed rock about eight feet across. He sees the kid has a small camp stool, a cooler, a coffee can filled with writhing earthworms. He’s whittled a stick to hold up his rod, and Alan notices a red and white plastic bobber floating out in the river. “Catching anything?”
“Yeah!” the kid says. “Mostly bluegills, but some days we’ll get catfish. What I want to catch is a bass.” Alan gets a better look at the kid. He’s probably ten or twelve, his body lean, his movements fluid as he reels in the line and throws another cast out toward the middle of the river. No signs of arthritis. No wrinkles. No grey. “The bluegills eat good, though, that’s for sure.”
“How the heck have you been getting out there,” Jess asks. The kid grins big, and they see his jeans are soaked from the knees down. “That water must be cold,” she says.
“Well, it’s just for a second to get out here. Then I’m pretty much set all afternoon. Got some sandwiches here. And pickles if you want one.” The kid starts to reach for his cooler.
“You need a bridge,” Jess says, and he stops reaching and stands tall and straight. His face lights up.
“There’s a big log over there, but it was too heavy for me to drag by myself. Nearly got myself tossed in the drink,” he says, pointing downriver to where a deadfall dips bony fingers into the murky water.
Alan realizes pretty quickly he’s in the way, and he backs a few feet up the hill as Jess and the kid free a thick log from the deadfall. He smells it again as they carry it past him: dank earth, rot, something richer that finds the back the of his throat and hangs there. Now Jess is taking off her shoes and rolling up her pant legs. She takes a few careful steps into the water, and they get one end of the log over the rock. The kid scrambles across it ably, sets the end into a natural notch in the stone. He stands on it, jumps up and down.
“What do you think, supervisor?” Jess calls back to Alan, who gives a thumbs up. Climbing onto the log, she asks, “You trust our engineering or what?” And then she’s across the bridge and on the rock, standing next to the kid, both beckoning with their hands. She cocks her head, raising her eyebrows, a dare. And he’s never passed up one of her dares.
It’s dicey, but he makes it across, reaching out both hands for them to take as he barely makes it to the island. The kid’s opening a jar of pickles, extending it to them. Alan wipes his hands on his pants and takes one, nodding thanks. Jess does the same. Above them the sky’s beginning to darken with fast moving clouds, and they watch as the sun disappears, crunching pickles, until the kid’s bobber goes under, and he picks up his rod to set the hook.
Alan leaves her at her front door. They hug again, hold it for a long time.
“Maybe not another ten years this time, okay?” she says, and she kisses him on the corner of his mouth. He promises, and he stands there a moment after she’s gone inside and latched the door. Then he turns and heads down the walk to where the Mercedes is parked under a hundred-year-old maple.
He detours, swinging two blocks down West Street, pausing at the intersection by the tracks. Down the block, he can see a huge pine tree mostly blocking a faded green house, a pickup truck parked in the driveway. Alan remembers planting that tree with his father, kneeling in the damp grass, turning over the soil, soaking it with the hose. Then he turns back toward the highway.
He drives north out of town, past farm fields and ramshackle barns, past faded Old Style beer signs and empty farm stands with flaking red paint. And hour later, he pulls into the lot of J. Ryan’s Supper Club on the mill pond at Randolph. He takes in the pond, its surface now covered with invasive milfoil. His mother would take them out here, Alan and his brother, and they’d cast worm-baited hooks into the pond. They didn’t catch much, an occasional panfish or carp, and Alan knew it was only stocked by the local farm kids, so they never kept anything. Seated inside at the bar, he orders a brandy old fashioned and the perch platter. He follows it with two beers poured out of the bottle and a slice of apple pie.
On his way back he stops for a half pint of Wild Turkey. He’s feeling nostalgic.
He’s stopped at the front desk by the granddaughter of his biggest fan. She hands him a note. He reads it, laughs, and asks if she can rustle up some epsom salts. Upstairs, he pours two fingers of Turkey over ice and looks at his phone for the first time all day. He hadn’t even realized it was still in Do Not Disturb. He sets the handwritten note – Alan Mears: A Mr. Davis called. He wants you to know “The goddamn house is on fire, Alan, and you won’t answer your fucking phone? Tell him that!” – on the nightstand.
Alan stands at the window, looks out toward town, the western horizon streaking with vivid color. He feels something pull at him, something call to him, and he turns to look across the room at the door. Then he’s taking a step, another, setting his glass down on the note. He doesn’t notice beads of condensation slide down the glass, send tendrils of ink across the page. He’s at the door, opening it, and he barely knows why.
The hallway is darker than it should be, though all the lamps burn in their shiny new fixtures. He listens for anything, a door downstairs, or Finch glad-handing another guest. Nothing. The building is deathly silent. The hallway seems to be darker still. And still he’s walking slowly toward the attic door. He’s reaching for the knob, turning it. Darkness surrounds him now, and he looks back toward his room. But all he sees are pools of moonlight spilling into the grey hallway. Splintered boards reach to him from the floor. The wallpaper hangs in great peels like dead flesh. From the end of the hall, two white eyes appear and then blink out.
Alan looks up through the doorway, sees the narrow staircase to the attic, strung with cobwebs, a shaft of pale moonlight bidding him climb. He reaches out for the dusty railing and steps up. Another. And now he’s thirteen again, his other shaking hand holding a flashlight. He gets to the top of the stairs and shines the light around the room, its weak beam an oily finger dragged across dropcloth-covered furniture, broken lamps, the shattered glass of the dormer window. He walks slowly toward the window, cautious of things he hears scurrying away from the light into the corners.
Alan takes the final step and turns off the flashlight, leans against the window frame and looks out. He’s never seen Granville from this vantage before, and any fear is momentarily forgotten. He’d never thought of his hometown as pretty before. But from up here, all twinkling orange lights caressing the black snake of the river, it’s beautiful.
But then the fear is back, and it clutches his chest like an icy hand. And Alan knows he’s not alone. He turns, slowly, and flicks on his flashlight. The beam once again crawls across the attic, bouncing in tandem with his beating heart. And there, at the top of the stairs, is a man. Alan feels a scream catch in his throat, feels his breath choking behind it, feels his heart punching against his ribs. Hears his brother laughing somewhere below him, the crash of something heavy falling. And then the man takes a step forward. But it’s not a man. And Alan sees its Batman shirt, sees a trembling hand flick on a flashlight.
And he’s standing at the dormer window, the sunset outside radiant with blood. Around him are neatly stacked and labeled boxes, stacked sheets of drywall. He sees a row of fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling over a workbench where a closed laptop sits. He’s not holding a flashlight, and the window isn’t broken. He’s 42 years old. And he is, truly, alone.
“Mr. Davis now?” Alan sips his whiskey with his back to the headboard, listens to Vic Davis panic from 2,500 miles away. The director and the producer are no longer on speaking terms. The director has, in fact, already left Chicago this afternoon and returned to Los Angeles, where she made it quite apparent to anyone in the production office she will be throwing “all that bitch’s shit” in the dumpster behind their bungalow in Echo Park. Production, it seems, is paused until they find another director. Or producer. Or both.
Alan is no longer needed in Chicago tomorrow. Does he want a flight home out of Milwaukee instead? Alan drains his glass and tells Vic no, thanks. He might stick around awhile. He leans in close to the mirror, rubs a hand across two days’ stubble coming in white. Maybe he’ll keep it. Alan pushes the plunger into the drain at the bottom of the tub, starts the hot water. He scoops in a few handfuls of epsom salts, watches the granules dissolve in the hot water, then pours himself another two fingers.
Alan carefully balances his phone on the soap dish and sinks into the cloudy water with a sigh of relief. His knees, his back, his shoulders immediately thank him. This did used to be easier, he thinks. All of it. He scrolls through his contacts, stops. He brings up the contact card, smiles at the photo. He sips his whiskey. He takes a deep breath. He taps “call” and raises the phone to his ear.
“Hey, man.” He grins and says, “You’ll never guess where I’m calling from.”
Jacob Strunk's genre-bending fiction appears most recently in Allegory, Marrow Magazine, The Writing Disorder, and his 2023 collection Screaming in Tongues. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and makes weird films and television in Los Angeles, where he lives with two rescue fish, a few framed movie posters, and the ghost of his cat, Stephen. You can find more to read and watch, if you dare, at www.sevenmileswest.com and @sevenmileswest on all the socials.
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