Neighbor George

by Victoria Nelson

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Literary Fiction; Gothic

Synopsis

A lonely young woman and a mysterious man meet in a northern California landscape populated by poets, New Agers, stoners, and dropouts.

Do you know the language of the birds?

Summer, 1979: A lonely young woman housesitting for her aunt and uncle in an isolated bohemian enclave finds troubling reminders of a past family tragedy surfacing in odd and unsettling ways. When a mysterious man moves in next door, Dovey hopes for a romance like the ones in the novels she secretly devours. But a dark truth hidden since childhood erupts shockingly in a violent otherworldly intrusion, catapulting her into a desperate struggle for her life and sanity.

Set in a haunted northern California landscape populated by poets, New Agers, stoners, and burnouts, Neighbor George is a deeply atmospheric story of psychological horror enacted in the liminal space where the natural collides with the supernatural.

 

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Release date: June 14, 2022

Publisher: Strange Attractor Press

Print pages: 256

Sample

Neighbor George

Each man is in his spectre's power

Until the arrival of that hour

When his humanity awake

And toss the spectre into the lake.

– William Blake

1

It was the summer of 1979. I had just graduated from college and was housesitting for my aunt and uncle while they were in Europe. Their white frame Craftsman sat between two other identical bungalows under a cluster of bay laurels in the little town of Bolinas, in West Marin County, on the northern California coast just above the Golden Gate Bridge.

Bolinas was not your usual coastal village. Cut off from civilization by the looming bulk of Mount Tamalpais, it had a land's end aura that drew the desperate fringe: aged hippie burnouts, street people, loonies who knew they wouldn't be arrested for lying down in the middle of the road or screaming about God's conspiracy with the CIA. People who lacked either the sense of drama or the energy to hurl themselves off the Golden Gate came from all over to kill themselves along this foggy stretch of coast. Drunks drove off the mountain. Ancient bohos gassed themselves in their VW vans. Drifters overdosed on reds in sleeping bags on the beach. Now a patina of commuting professionals had spread itself across, but failed to penetrate, the community's entrenched bohemian scruffiness.

There was also the Industry to contend with. My friends back at school warned me of what I hadn't been aware of, spending summers out here as a child – that if I ever stumbled onto a marijuana field up on Bolinas mesa, especially near harvest time, I should throw up my hands at once, close my eyes, and walk backward as fast as possible. Except for the ocean, the mountain, and the black labs in the backs of pickup trucks, in a way it was just like being back in Berkeley.

Two retired schoolteachers lived in the second house in our little compound. The third house, the one on the other side, had been empty for as long as I could remember.

“It's the first of the month, Dovey,” Al Finch said to me early one Saturday morning over the chicken wire fence separating his yard from my aunt and uncle's. (Al's real name wasn't Finch, by the way, and mine isn't Dovey.)

Al liked to dangle these little remarks and wait for a response. When he saw I couldn't think of anything to say, he jerked his thumb toward the third house in our culvert. “Comp’ny.”

I glanced over hopefully. The front yard was overgrown, the blinds were drawn. The squat frame house looked as deserted and depressing as always.

“Jaguar Jim at the realty says a guy from out of state is renting it.”

I looked again. The rusty latches on the sagging garage doors were fused with age.

“He must be invisible. And have an invisible car.”

“Well, he hasn't gotten here yet,” Al said impatiently. He turned back to his zucchini in the ragtag garden plot that bordered our two properties, giving me a clear view of the widely separated platinum hairs sprouting from his pink dome. They looked sewn in, like the Orlon tresses of the dolls I played with as a girl. “Now you won't be all by yourself.”

Mr. and Mrs. Finch – Al and Sally – worried about me, I knew. Sally said it was because I didn't know any young people my own age in Bolinas, but I knew what she really meant was the Tragedy. The first time Sally saw me that summer, after a decade away from Bolinas, she looked at my bitten fingernails and said, “What's the matter, honey?” And even though it had never occurred to me that not having fingernails meant something was the matter, I didn't mind her bringing it up. I didn't think she was being nosy at all; it made me feel looked after. Like my mother before her, my aunt was much too well bred to bring up anything like that during the years I was under her care, when I spent my summers with her and my uncle across the bay. The sisters shared what you might call a light touch when it came to child rearing.

I can't say I noticed the lack of attention at the time. If something too big happens to you when you are very young, it freezes you at that moment in time, just like those bodies of people who get trapped in Alpine glaciers: when the ice melts they haven't aged a minute while all their townspeople have grown old. Early on I froze, and because I froze I felt nothing.

“Goddamn deer,” Al was saying, kicking at the dirt. “They've gone and trampled everything. Looks like a tank came through.”

Sam nosed my knee with his head and I saw that his fur had gotten matted again. Since Al and Sally never seemed to get around to it, I brushed their unkempt black cat when they weren't looking. That was the thing about Al and Sally. They seemed very caring – I had vague memories from childhood of Al fixing my broken wagon when my parents and I had been over for a visit – but up close I wasn't sure how truly interested they were in their own lives or anyone else's.

“Another thing,” Al said. “Hear anything last night out in the grove?”

I shook my head.

“Hell of a commotion. Sam came streaking in like nothing you ever saw. Thought it might be a bobcat. I checked this morning. No scat or anything. And now the damn deer.”

I said nothing because that thick stand of eucalyptus trees behind these three houses had always terrified me for no good reason. I had steered clear of it ever since I could remember.

“So long,” I said to Al and climbed into my uncle's 1964 Bel Air, a perfectly preserved two-tone beige and brown steamboat with pushbutton automatic transmission. “Like a Waring blender,” I had once commented to my uncle, who took offense because he thought I was laughing at his car.

Al, who was down on his knees, grunted. To the Bel Air I said, “Puree!” punched the Drive button, and lurched off to town for a pastry at the Blue Heron before work.

I parked at the end of Wharf Road near the beach, bought my cranberry muffin at the converted Victorian bakery and sat down on the front steps to eat it. Across the way in the empty lot next to Smiley's some of the street guys lay snoozing on the hoods of their big old American cars.

“I never see you here in town.”

Grey-haired, blue-jeaned, down-vested Sally Finch stood over me. Was this an accusation? It was true I didn't frequent Wharf Road. Though I didn't like to admit it, I preferred Stinson Beach down the road because the people there weren't quite as weird and I did so want to be normal, it was my great goal in life.

As I opened my mouth to answer, Sally was already hailing a woman across the street. “That's Sheila Robbins,” she said to me. “Did you know she and Rob are having a poetry conference here next week? You ought to get in on this.”

Sally was always going on about the Bolinas poets and what a tight little circle they had. But since I couldn't tell who sitting next to me on the bakery steps was a poet, who was a carpenter, and who was a dope dealer, I would have had the same trouble starting up a conversation with a poet, if not more so for wanting to get to know him, as with anybody else. What's more, I knew from my friends in Berkeley that the golden age of Bolinas poetry was over and done with; it had petered out some time back, the same way, even farther back in the mists of time, the Sausalito bohemian scene had self-destructed. By the time people found out about it and started moving here, the real poets had left.

The woman crossed over to join us in the bakery yard. She wore a black loose-fitting Japanese tunic and dirty pink ballerina slippers. Her brown hair flecked with grey hung in a long braid. Sunbursts of tiny crow's feet rimmed the corners of her eyes. I noticed them right away because I was only twenty-two and already had my first crow's foot. This event was so significant I was always looking to see how many of them other women had, even while it seemed inconceivable to me that I would ever get any more.

Sally introduced me and Sheila smiled warmly. “Dovey wants to know about the Parliament of Poets,” Sally went on, though this was news to me. “She has just graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with honors in literature.”

As Sheila homed in, I sensed that responsibility for me was being handed on. “Oh, you have to come! We're having James Harrier.”

I felt grateful for her interest, but I was not much of a poetry reader because unlike novels poems did not provide, page for page, the kind of long-term total escape from Planet Earth I craved. I had only vaguely heard of James Harrier and my lack of recognition must have registered.

“He's arguably our greatest living poet.” The delicate tracery around Sheila's eyes twitched, weblike, as she made this proud assertion. As an earnest literature major I always wondered why people who wrote criticism were so fond of saying “arguably.” Did they want to argue? Or did they just mean “I am arguing that – ”? And who was she talking about when she said “our”? Hers and mine and Sally's? Or hers and somebody else's?

That was not the sort of point Sally wasted her time worrying about. “Dovey hasn't lived out here since she was little,” she said briskly. “She needs to meet some interesting people.”

“Everybody who's coming is interesting!” Sheila declared.

I shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. It was nice these two women wanted to help me, though I had the uneasy feeling Sally had already briefed Sheila about the Tragedy. Yes, I was lonely, desperately lonely out here in Bolinas after all the bustle of school. For a while I had tried to think of people I knew to invite out to stay with me. Nick, my old boyfriend who was still my friend, was in Montana. My roommate Betsy was still working in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua. Thinking I had so few resources to draw on made me even lonelier.

All the same I wanted to be alone. Important things were about to happen, I just knew it. As soon as I had gotten to my aunt and uncle's house, I had felt deep, mysterious stirrings. Something was approaching. Outside, inside, not quite with me but very, very close. And I had to be by myself to welcome it.

I bobbed my head at Sally and Sheila. “Sorry, I've got to get to work.”

Walking back to the car, I paused at the bulkhead above the beach. Here under the eroding cliffs you could look across the fast-moving water in the narrow channel to the sandspit tip of Stinson Beach a scant fifty feet away. Sally had told me that one of the Bolinas derelicts tried to take a shortcut to Stinson by swimming across the channel towing a garbage bag full of his possessions. The current had swept him and the bag out the channel mouth, where a surfer on the first line of waves had providentially snatched him from the rip and towed him back to shore.

The street person lost his stuff, but not his life. My mother hadn't been so lucky.

I drove back through town and turned right on Highway 1 into a scene of primeval stillness. A line of undulating hills marched one after the other down the coast to the Golden Gate. Ghostly veils of morning fog hung over the lagoon, creeping up the broad folds of Mount Tamalpais that rose steeply on the other side of the road. All this land surrounding Bolinas and Stinson Beach was part of a gigantic park called the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Transient creatures of every kind – ducks, butterflies, and whales as well as hawks and humans – passed through the Golden Gate National Recreation Area on their way north or south. Few stayed. Many of the people only roosted a season or two.

From the earliest I could remember, I loved this West Marin landscape. Sometimes I could feel myself losing my boundaries and simply dissolving into it, drawing my soul's nourishment from this beautiful place like the motherless kid I was. Just now, for example, the strange sensation I was experiencing seemed to be seeping out through the pores of my skin into the outer world, then turning back on itself and breaking over me like a big wave.

What wondrous love is this, o my heart, o my heart?

What wondrous love is this, o my heart?

The Shaker hymn kept spinning circles inside me. Yes, he was coming. It was love at last, I knew it. The great love my own heart had always yearned for. Something out there loved me, or rather, I loved something out there as yet unmaterialized. What I yearned for was finally upon me. Here, now.

Just as I had this thought, a big shadow slid across the Bel Air's ample hood.

I craned my neck up. A bird with large black and white checkered wings – a hawk or vulture? – circled overhead. A split-second later it dropped like a stone into a clump of roadside sage about twenty feet ahead.

As I zipped past around the curve a great thrashing came from inside the bush, and without any warning my stomach turned over twice and I felt very uneasy.

2

“Gnawed.”

Roy was steaming milk so loud I barely heard him.

“What was what?”

“The head. Gnawed off.”

The owner of the Big Cup was a stocky, sandy-haired middle-aged ex-parole officer from Red Bluff whose face flushed when he laughed, which was most of the time.

“Heard about the missing hiker?” he'd asked as I put on a clean white apron behind the counter.

The missing hiker was the latest standing joke among the regulars. The week before, a member of a birding group from Davis had gone missing up on Bolinas mesa. Searchers had been brought in, an action that provoked much ironic comment among the locals. Out here in the dubious wilds of the Golden Gate Recreational Area – where the park trails, wide as freeways, doubled as fire roads and bristled with directional signs – getting lost took serious effort.

And when I'd answered, a little impatiently, “Like he's all you ever talk about,” Roy had pointed smugly to a front page in the discarded newspaper basket next to the counter.

The headline gave me a jolt. “Human Head Found on Bolinas Beach.” I scanned the article quickly. The day before somebody had come upon a man's battered head wedged among the kelp and anemones in a tidepool below the cliff trail. DNA matches were being sought with the missing hiker's family.

“It wasn't cleanly severed from the spinal cord,” Roy went on, now that he had my attention. “It was mangled. And covered with bite marks.” Possibly because of his former profession, my employer relished all the gory details of the human misfortunes so frequently enacted out here.

The guy who owned the garden shop next door was at the counter. “Thank you for sharing that.”

Roy rang him up briskly. “You're welcome.”

“It doesn't say that in the story,” I pointed out.

“One of the sheriff's deputies stopped in early when I was opening up. They think it might have been a shark attack.”

“On Bolinas mesa?”

“They think he might have gone for a swim at the beach. Palomarin, near the waterfall.”

From the murder mysteries I devoured, I knew that was the kind of detail police investigators usually withheld from the public in order to determine the true culprit. But this was West Marin, where everybody knew everything.

“Don't ask for lettuce next time you go to the Point Reyes Station farmer's market, Dovey.”

One of Roy's jokes was on the way. “Why not?”

“Somebody might try to sell you an extra head.”

The laughter from the locals sitting within earshot was muted. Except for low-level drug-related encounters, serious crime was unknown out here. Violent death, when it happened, was either accidental or self-inflicted.

Memories of the Tragedy sent a few ripples lapping against the shore of my consciousness. I chose to ignore them. If the great white sharks were doing their thing out there – well, folks, just stay out of the water! A shark gobbling up the missing hiker was unfortunate, but at least his family knew what had become of him.

The rest of the morning I smiled at my customers as I served them coffee and poppyseed cake, but it rarely went beyond that. When we did talk, it was your basic small town greeting, ritualized as a Noh play and just about as personal. And these Stinson Beachers were clannish. It was their hip village, their post office, their fire department, their softball team, their complicated love lives. Until you joined up, one way or another, you didn't belong. And even though it felt less crazy than Bolinas, I didn't want to join up. Stinson was like some old boys’ club. The truth was, I didn't fit in here any better than I did across the lagoon.

My shift ended at noon. As I walked out the front door, there was Chevy Jim sitting on the porch with his golden retriever Isaiah. Isaiah's tail flapped a couple of times, but Chevy Jim stayed pointedly engrossed in the paper. I was glad he was back at the cafe, even if not to the point of sitting inside or acknowledging me.

Before Chevy Jim decided to look up, I hurried across the highway toward the north end of the beach park. In my free time I was supposed to be studying Latin and German to get ready for graduate school back east in the fall. I hardly ever did, even though not doing it made me feel guilty. Instead I took long walks on the beach. Sometimes I lay in the dunes and slept, or I read a murder mystery I had bought in the little bookstore.

People were always telling me I was aloof. If aloof meant aloft, I could understand that. If I was anything, it was airborne. It wasn't just because of the Tragedy. I had always been this way, or at least I remembered already being like this even when I still had a family. In an emotional vacuum children's hearts drift skyward. By the time I was seven, my deepest wish was to fly like Peter Pan; I often pictured to myself how amazed people would be, far down below, when they saw me soaring high overhead! Even now I zoomed myself up to the top of Mount Tam, under Tomales Bay where the great whites bred, beyond the massive fogbank that loomed off the coast every night, and when this began to unsettle me too much I read murder mysteries or paperback romances and fell in love with the heroes. I was floating through the complicated universe inside me, scarcely ever touching down. And when you are buying coffee from a young woman with a universe inside her, it's hard to start up a conversation.

Now I was all wrapped up in the stubborn joy that kept rising. An unquenchable feeling that my life trapped inside the glacier was ending and my real life, my wonderful real life, was finally about to begin.

The surf crashed loud as I made my way through the tall pampas grass between the houses that fronted the beach. A recent storm had eaten the wide flat expanse into a narrow ribbon; what the ocean had thrown up overnight lay strewn along the sand. I waded through the gullies gouged by the storm surges. Pieces of lumber and dirty clots of foam streaked the high water mark. There was gravel everywhere, jellyfish the size of dinner plates. A dead seal lay trapped in greenish-yellow tentacles of kelp.

What would a human head look like tangled up in those long bulbous ropes?

The thought made me beat a hasty retreat from the water's edge. I found a protected spot in the dunes and opened up the battered paperback I had brought with me, a Gothic romance I had picked up in the Free Box outside the Bolinas health food store. The Secret of Rowena Manor was well below the usual level of my escape reading and for that reason even more delightfully compelling. I was bitterly ashamed of these books and hid the copies under my aunt and uncle's bed even though there was no one else to see them. ...