A Question of Reality
No ferry or day cruise boats run between the Massachusetts mainland and Gull's Head Island—not anymore, that is. These days, summer tourists head to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, but there was once a time when wealthy families from Boston and even from as far away as New York and Philadelphia spent their summers relaxing or playing on the island's sandy beaches. The Seafarer Inn, which was built in the late 1890s during the age of the grand resort hotels, had dominated the tiny island; and once the inn closed its doors in the 1970s, Gull's Head was left deserted.
Normally, the Seafarer Inn would have faded away from public consciousness, living on only in old postcards and in the failing memories of its former guests, had not Wallace Ingalls, an elementary school teacher who had stayed at the hotel with his parents when he was a young boy, written a novel that immortalized the old resort. That book, entitled Terror on Gull's Head Island, became an international bestseller, and the Seafarer Inn became as well known to horror fans as the Dutch colonial house on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York.
* * *
When reality television was still in its infancy, Heath Drummond was one of its first successful producers; but now that the industry was overrun with all manner of reality series, Heath was running out of ideas.
"What about a Green Acres type of show?" suggested Alicia Ewing, his assistant producer. "We could send a group of urban professionals to live on a farm."
"Do you really think people want to watch a bunch of yuppies milk cows and shovel horse manure?"
"I've seen worse. Have you ever watched MTV's The Real World?" she laughed.
"I want something that will appeal to a wide range of viewers, not just a select few."
"What about a new take on The Bachelor? We could feature a single parent looking for a husband or wife, but the catch will be that the child gets to pick his or her favorite contestant."
Despondent, Heath shook his head.
"Let's go out to lunch," he sighed.
"It's only eleven o'clock. Besides, I ate breakfast this morning, and I'm not hungry."
"Then you can order a cup of coffee or a diet soda or whatever you're drinking these days. I want to go to lunch; I always think better while I'm eating."
They went to a small diner where Heath ordered a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke. While he was waiting for his food, he idly scanned the diner's patrons: a handful of senior citizens taking advantage of the over-sixty-five discount, a mother with two small children in booster seats and a middle-aged woman in a booth with only a paperback book for company.
Out of idle curiosity, Heath squinted his eyes to read the title: Terror on Gull's Head Island. He had read that novel when he was in high school, and it had scared the hell out of him, so much so that he slept with his bedroom light on for nearly a month afterward.
"What are you staring at?" Alicia wondered.
"That woman is reading Terror on Gull's Head Island. Ever read it?"
"Nah, but I saw the movie. It gave me the creeps."
Heath sat up suddenly, and a smile spread across his face.
"You don't suppose that old hotel is still standing, do you?"
"I don't know. Maybe someone turned it into condos or time-share units."
"When we get back to the office, I want you to check it out."
"Why? Are you planning a little vacation this summer?"
"No. But I've got an idea for our next show."
* * *
The old Seafarer Inn was still standing, although it had long since fallen into disrepair. The current owners, who had given up all hope of ever selling such a white elephant, were only too glad to discuss a short-term rental arrangement.
"What about contestants?" Alicia inquired as she and Heath were going over production details. "Do you want the athletic Survivor type? Or would you prefer sexy but clueless contestants to give the series some comic relief?"
"Do me a favor, will you?" her boss requested, too preoccupied with his own thoughts to answer her question. "Go down to the bookstore, and buy me a copy of Terror on Gull's Head Island."
"Right now? Why the rush?"
"I want to duplicate as closely as possible the circumstances in the novel," Heath replied. "Our contestants are going to be selected based on the characters in the book."
"Why? The book was fiction."
"True, but if I remember correctly, the author claimed that he had stayed at the Seafarer Inn when he was younger and that he wrote the book based on actual events that took place there years earlier. He hinted that the old inn was haunted. That's how we're going to present the facts to the contestants and the audience. We'll make the Seafarer seem as sinister and as spine-chilling as the Overlook Hotel in The Shining."
* * *
Plans for the series moved ahead smoothly. The contestants were chosen, and as Heath had proposed, they corresponded as closely as possible to the characters in the book. All seven were young adults under the age of thirty and included a college student, a physical education teacher, a photographer, a writer, a nurse, a musician and a commercial fisherman—four men and three women.
It took two weeks to wire the old resort for the computers and video cameras that would be the only contact between the contestants and the production crew on the mainland. Once the electrical work was completed, the cameramen prepared to begin shooting.
On the plane from L.A. to Boston, Alicia read Terror on Gull's Head Island. When she finished the fourth chapter, she dog-eared the page to mark her spot, turned the book over and examined the author's photograph on the back cover.
"Did he ever write any other books?" she asked Heath, who was sitting next to her.
"No, as a matter of fact, he didn't. He wrote that one and then pulled a J.D. Salinger."
"A what?"
"A J.D. Salinger. He wrote The Catcher in the Rye. Now he's a recluse, and so is Wallace Ingalls."
"It doesn't surprise me. I think all writers are a bit eccentric, this Ingalls guy especially. He'd have to be a little strange to think up this weird stuff."
"Or maybe the Seafarer Inn is really haunted."
* * *
Three days later, Heath drove his rental car to his temporary office, a double-wide trailer located within sight of the hastily constructed dock where the contestants would board the boat headed for the island. When the producer got out of the car, Alicia met him at the door.
"You've got a visitor," his assistant announced with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.
Heath saw an old man sitting on the couch inside the trailer. He was more than eighty years old, bent and wrinkled, with a head of long white hair and a full, bushy beard. Given his appearance, the old man stood a good chance of landing the role of Kris Kringle in a revival of Miracle on 34th Street.
"Are you Mr. Drummond?" the visitor asked in a voice that still held traces of a Yankee accent.
"I am. Who are you?"
"Wallace Ingalls. I read in The Boston Globe that you're going to film a TV program out on Gull's Head Island, some sort of adaptation of my book."
"That's not true, Mr. Ingalls."
Heath feared the writer had crawled out of the woodwork in hopes of getting a royalty check.
"We're filming a reality show that has absolutely nothing to do with your novel."
The old man became agitated.
"You mustn't let anyone go out there to that island. It's not safe."
"There's nothing to fear, old timer," Heath insisted in a condescending tone. "We've had a few inspectors check the place over, and we don't believe there will be any floors collapsing or roofs caving in."
"That's not the danger I'm talking about. There is evil out on that island."
"I'm sure there is, and I'm certain there's quite a bit of it here on the mainland, too. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a great deal of work to do."
"You can't send people to Gull's Head Island," the writer persisted. "They'll die out there."
"Goodbye, Mr. Ingalls," Heath growled as he gently shoved the old man out the door and slammed it shut behind him.
"I told you all writers are one egg short of a dozen," Alicia joked.
* * *
Alicia and Heath were on the dock to watch the filming of the bon voyage portion of the first episode. All seven contestants were interviewed in turn. Each was optimistic that he or she would not be voted off the show and would share in the $100,000 prize at the end of the four weeks. Everything went well until the final minutes before the boat was ready to cast off. Then, as Heath had feared, Wallace Ingalls arrived.
"Damn it!" the producer swore when he saw the old man hobbling toward him.
Heath alerted the security guards and tried to hurry the contestants on board the launch.
"Wait!" Ingalls shouted, having no success getting past the guards. "Don't get on that boat!"
"Who's that?" the musician wanted to know.
"No one. Just a local eccentric," Heath assured him. "Everyone, get on board. Let's get this show started."
"You'll all die if you go out to that island!"
Several of the contestants started to laugh. None of them took the old man seriously.
After the launch cast off, Heath went over to the distraught author.
"If you persist with these wild ravings," he threatened, "I'll take out a restraining order to keep you away."
"Why won't you listen? Those young people will die on that island. I know it."
Heath pushed past him and headed toward his rental car.
"I was at the Seafarer," Ingalls continued. "I know what I'm talking about."
Refusing to listen, the producer got into his car, turned the volume up on his stereo and drove away.
* * *
The first hours on Gull's Head Island passed uneventfully. The seven contestants spent the time exploring the lower level of the old hotel, deciding on sleeping arrangements and dividing housekeeping tasks among themselves. Then they sat down to a quick and rather tasteless meal. An hour later, they were startled by the sound of breaking glass followed by a blood-curdling scream.
"What was that?" the photographer cried.
"Sounds like it came from outside," the student responded.
"It's probably just Drummond's crew trying to scare us," the fisherman theorized. "We'll likely encounter a lot of haunted house props and horror movie special effects while we're here."
"Just the same," the student declared, grabbing his flashlight, "I'll go check it out."
The others followed him outside, where, after a ten-minute search, they found a body lying amidst shards of broken glass.
"It's Gina, the nurse," the photographer observed. "It looks like she either fell or jumped from that upstairs window."
"If she wanted to jump, wouldn't she have opened the window first?" the musician pointed out.
"Most likely, but we're leaving out a third alternative: she might have been pushed."
The six remaining contestants returned to the lobby of the Seafarer, where a computer was set up so that they could contact the mainland in case of an emergency. They all agreed that the young nurse's death qualified as such.
"Son of a bitch!" Heath cursed when he read the message on the computer screen. "There's been an accident on the island."
"What kind of accident?" Alicia inquired. "Will we need to call the hospital and ask them to send a medevac helicopter?"
"I don't think that's necessary. There's not much they can do; the young woman is dead."
"What? How did she die?"
Alicia had been with Heath since the pilot episode of his first television show, and there had never been any injuries more serious than cuts and bruises and a sprained ankle.
"She fell out of the window. Probably drunk or high. We should have screened these people more carefully."
"Which contestant was it?" Alicia queried in a strained whisper.
"The nurse—Gina something or other."
The assistant's complexion turned several shades whiter.
"Oh, my God! It's happening again."
"What the devil are you talking about?"
"When did you read Ingalls's book? I'm talking about actually reading it from cover to cover, not just skimming through the text."
"Back in high school. Why?"
"How much do you remember?"
"Just the basics. It was about a group of young people who sneak over to the island during the off-season and have some sort of a party at the deserted hotel. Then, one by one, they're killed. When the caretaker comes back to the island, he finds that no one is left alive."
"Well, I read the book on the flight from L.A., so the details are still fresh in my mind. The first victim in the story is a student nurse. Want to guess how she dies? She falls from one of the top-floor windows."
Naturally, Heath did not want to shut down the production, not after he had already invested quite a bit of money in it. Nor did he want to phone the police, for fear they would interrupt the shooting with a lengthy investigation. The surviving contestants—all six—agreed with him. None of them wanted to call it quits and give up hope of sharing in the $100,000 pot.
"We'll call the police when the shooting is over," the producer promised. "I'll think of something to tell them then. Just leave it to me."
"What about the body?" Alicia argued. "You can't leave it out there for four weeks."
"There is a walk-in freezer in the kitchen of the Seafarer. The fisherman is going to hook it up to the generator we installed to run the video equipment."
"Are you crazy?" Alicia screamed. "You just can't dispose of a body like that."
"I'm not disposing of it. I'm preserving the remains until we can bring in the authorities. I didn't kill her. What can they do to me? Give me a fine? Sentence me to community service?"
Perhaps Heath would have been proved right. Maybe the police would have let him go with only a slap on the wrist, but when the morning sun came up the next day, a second body was discovered.
* * *
On Gull's Head Island, a shrill scream pierced the early morning hours. The writer and the fisherman ran to the grand staircase where the photographer stood pointing up at the body of the gym teacher, hanging from a rope tied to the third-floor railing.
"Someone is going to have to cut her down," the writer advised, not volunteering for the job himself.
"She's too high up, and we don't have a ladder," the fisherman contended. "We'll have to haul the body up over the railing and then put it in the freezer with the other one."
The writer concurred.
"And then we can contact Drummond and see what he wants to do now."
By the time the fisherman and student returned from the kitchen, the rest of their group was assembled in the lobby, and the photographer had given them the terrible news about the gym teacher.
"Are you sure she was dead?" the musician demanded to know.
The student nodded gravely.
"I'm pre-med. I've seen my share of corpses."
"Do you think they'll close us down now?" the photographer asked.
The fisherman considered the idea carefully.
"I think Drummond will want to keep it going. Whether we want to stay is up to us."
"I don't want to go," the photographer said. "The first death was probably an accident and this one a suicide, or maybe they were both suicides. Either way, I don't think we're in any danger."
The fisherman raised his eyebrows.
"Danger or not, I'm not leaving. I need the money. If we split it among the five of us, that's twenty thousand apiece."
When the contestants contacted Heath Drummond, their decision was unanimous: the show would go on.
"Another death?" Alicia assumed when she saw the nervous twitch in Heath's eye. "Let me guess: the teacher was found hanging above the grand staircase."
Heath turned startled eyes toward his production assistant.
"How did ...?"
Alicia held up the book.
"It's right in here, and if we don't do something quick, the musician will be next."
Heath paced the floor for several minutes. Then he grasped at a logical explanation.
"Maybe those two women read the book, and it gave them the idea to kill themselves. What do they call it: autosuggestion or something like that?"
"Come on! Do you really think that's the case?"
"Doesn't it make more sense than the idea that there's a ghost out there killing people?"
Alicia's eyes fell on the paperback novel.
"I wonder how much of this book is based on fact. How many deaths have occurred at the Seafarer Hotel over the years? I'm going to find out."
"Don't ask Ingalls, whatever you do," Heath cautioned. "The last thing we need now is to have that old crackpot in here crying 'I told you so.'"
Alicia did not contact the author. Instead, she went to the public library, where she found several magazine articles and newspaper clippings about the old resort. There was nothing of any interest, but the librarian referred her to a local historian. The former high school history teacher, once an employee of the Seafarer, had the answers to her questions.
"If the Seafarer is haunted, then I'm George Washington!" he chuckled. "It was a wonderful old place, a family resort. In fact, its history was quite remarkable in that it was so uneventful. In all those years, there were very few accidents. Occasionally, someone in the kitchen got burned while cooking. And we had a youngster try to climb the tree out back and fall and break his arm. That was in 1953 or '54."
"What about deaths?"
"In 1937, I believe it was, an old man collapsed in his room from a heart attack. He died on the ferry back to the mainland."
"Weren't there any other deaths? Did a young woman ever jump or fall from an upstairs window? Did one hang herself above the grand staircase?"
"You've been reading Mr. Ingalls's novel. That book was pure fiction."
As Alicia was driving back to the trailer, dark clouds appeared, and the wind kicked up. Shortly thereafter, the storm broke. There was a heavy downpour, and flashes of lightning split the sky. At that point, the crew in the trailer lost all communication with Gull's Head Island.
* * *
The five contestants sat in the lobby, eating their canned rations by candlelight.
"It's a bit like camping out," the photographer opined.
"Don't expect me to sing Kumbaya," the fisherman teased.
The writer turned to look out the window just as a bolt of lightning struck something on the lawn. Suddenly, a huge tree limb broke through the window and crashed into the lobby.
"The computer!" the writer yelled, fearing that their only means of contact had been destroyed.
The musician and the fisherman ran toward the Dell, which had been placed beneath the window on a picnic table. As they struggled with the tree branch, the rain poured in and drenched them to the skin. After the branch was cleared away, everyone was relieved to see that the computer monitor was still intact.
"Why don't we move it to the middle of the room, where it will be out of harm's way?" the fisherman recommended.
The lights flickered on again just as the musician was disconnecting the computer cables. Unfortunately, he had neglected to unplug the power cord. Soaking wet, he was the perfect conductor of electricity. The other contestants stared in horror as the guitar player was electrocuted before their eyes—all except the writer, who was too busy vomiting after he got a whiff of burned flesh.
Mercifully, the lights soon went out again.
* * *
A brief message came through to the trailer on the mainland.
"Oh, shit! Not another one!" Heath exclaimed in exasperation.
Alicia did not bother to ask who or how; she already knew.
"We've got to get the remaining people off that island before they're killed, too."
"Now you sound like Ingalls," her boss told her angrily. "There are no ghosts out on Gull's Head Island."
"What about a living, breathing killer?" Alicia reasoned, picking up the paperback and waving it under her boss's nose. "One inspired by this book."
Surprisingly, Heath was interested in what she had to say. Hadn't several killers gotten ideas from books? The most notable one was Mark David Chapman, who, reportedly obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye, gunned down John Lennon outside his New York apartment building.
"Do you think it's one of the other contestants?"
"It might be," Alicia conjectured. "If not, then someone else is out there on the island with them."
"What if—nom it's too ridiculous."
"What were you going to say?"
"What if it's Ingalls himself?"
"Why would he want to kill anyone? He tried his hardest to prevent them from going to the island in the first place."
"Did he? Or was he just trying to get attention? Look, a guy writes a bestseller—his first book, mind you—and then disappears from the public eye. Why? Could it be that he just can't write another book, that there was only one story in him? Then we come along and send contestants to that island, and they get killed. Think of how many people will want to run out and buy Ingalls's book."
"You forget: he's an old man. He can barely walk."
"Maybe that's just an act. Maybe he's not really as feeble as we think."
When they heard the full details of the musician's death from those on the island and were certain that his death had been an accident, Heath and Alicia discarded their murder theory.
* * *
"It looks like we're in for more rain," the student noted the following morning, as he looked up at the ominous clouds gathering over the Atlantic. "If we do get another storm, we should all stay away from the windows."
"And the electrical wires," the fisherman added.
"Yeah," the photographer declared with a humorless laugh, "we're running out of space in the freezer."
Little did the young woman know that her body would be the last corpse placed in it for safekeeping. By the time the others finished eating lunch, she would be dead, presumably of a drug overdose.
"That's four out of seven," the student claimed after he felt for a pulse and found none. "The odds are against us now. I don't know about you, but I'm going to vote myself off this island."
"Me, too," the fisherman decuded. "What good is money to a dead man?"
Only the writer looked uncertain.
"But these were all accidental deaths."
"Oh?" the fisherman challenged him. "How did the teacher accidentally hang herself?"
"All right. She was a suicide, but we're in no imminent danger."
"Maybe, maybe not," the student debated, "but I'm not taking any chances."
The choice to leave having been made, he and the fisherman gathered their belongings.
"Should we contact Drummond and have him send a boat for us?" the student wondered.
The fisherman shook his head.
"I have a feeling he won't act that quickly, and I want to get off this godforsaken island as soon as possible. There's a boathouse out back that contains a seaworthy vessel. It's no yacht, but it'll get us safely to the mainland. I'll need your help getting it in the water, though."
As the two men were preparing to cast off, they saw the writer approaching the dock, carrying his duffel bags.
"Coming with us?" the student called.
"I'm not about to stay here alone," he replied, climbing into the boat.
"Goodbye, Gull's Head Island," the fisherman bellowed, pointing the boat west. "Next time, I'll go to Nantucket."
Soon, the island was nothing more than a dot on the horizon. The vessel was still miles away from the mainland when the storm hit, this one much worse than the one the previous day.
* * *
"I can't reach them," Heath muttered as he nervously typed another message on the computer.
"Maybe the power is out on the island," Alicia said.
They heard a car pull up on the gravel outside, and then there was a knock on the door.
What now? Heath thought.
When Alicia opened the door, Wallace Ingalls was standing on the steps.
"They're dead, aren't they?" he inquired, his eyes shining like a madman's.
"Get out of here, Ingalls!" Heath hollered. "I don't want to have to deal with you, too."
While the two men were arguing, Alicia spotted a small boat being tossed about on the sea and cried, "I think they're coming back."
She and the two men ran outside into the rain to watch the progress of the boat.
Alicia squinted.
"I can only see one person. I'm not sure, but it looks like the writer."
"There's no one in the boat," Ingalls asserted with resignation.
"I saw someone," Alicia maintained. Then she stood on her tiptoes, waved her arms above her head and shouted, "Ahoy! Who's there?"
When the boat neared land, they could see that it was indeed empty. Wallace Ingalls turned and slowly walked back to his car. Alicia followed at his heels.
"How did you know there was no one in the boat?"
The old man continued walking, not bothering to answer her. The production assistant reached out and grabbed him by the arm.
"You've come here to talk to us, and now we're going to listen."
"I'm getting wet. Can we go inside?"
Heath got a towel out of the bathroom and handed it to the author. Then he sat behind his desk and sulked as Alicia interrogated the reclusive writer.
"I guess you have to deal with me now," Ingalls said with a satisfied smirk.
Alicia repeated her question.
"How did you know there was no one in the boat? I saw someone—the writer, I think."
"That idea of yours of having the contestants closely parallel the characters in my book—I'll bet you thought you were being very clever. But I didn't choose those characters, Mr. Drummond. I saw them when I went out to the Seafarer."
"There couldn't have been any ghosts out there," Alicia interrupted. "No one ever died at the Seafarer Inn, until now, that is."
"I never claimed to have seen ghosts of the past," Ingalls explained. "What I saw were visions of the future. I knew those deaths were going to take place, but I didn't know when."
The old man briefly fell silent, reliving the horrors of the past and the present.
"When the Seafarer closed its doors, I thought—hoped—that the visions I had seen were nothing more than the result of an overactive imagination. But when I read the article in the Globe about your television show, I knew my fears were well-founded."
"We know the nurse, the teacher and the musician are dead. But what about the others?" Alicia asked. "Perhaps there's a chance that they're still alive."
Ingalls shook his head.
"The photographer had a heart attack as a result of a drug overdose, the fisherman was struck by lightning while attempting to make it back to the mainland and the medical student was washed overboard in the storm and drowned."
"What about the writer?"
"There was no writer. He was the one fictional character in my book. He represented me, or rather that part of me that could travel through time and see into the future."
"But our contestant? He was real enough."
"Was he?" Ingalls skeptically asked.
Alicia went to the computer and watched the interviews filmed before the contestants embarked for the island. She fast-forwarded through the others, searching for the writer. However, there was no footage of him.
"I know he was there. I remember him distinctly because when I first saw him, I thought he reminded me of someone."
"Who?"
"I don't know. I couldn't put my finger on it."
"What was his name?"
Alicia opened a manila file and took out the biographical information on the contestants.
"Here it is," she announced. "His name is Evander Roth, and he's from Boston."
Armed with this information, she went online and typed in his name and address. She was dismayed to learn that there was no Evander Roth either in Boston or anywhere else, for that matter.
"There was no writer on the island, Miss Ewing," Ingalls repeated with certainty. "If there had been, I would have seen him in my premonitions."
Alicia did not press the matter, but she knew what she had seen with her own eyes. There had been seven contestants, four men and three women, and one of the men had been a writer.
Having said his piece—albeit too late to have prevented the deaths of six innocent people—Wallace Ingalls got up and left.
"I'm going back to the hotel and pack my bags," Heath announced with a heavy sigh. "I want to go home to California immediately after we speak to the police here."
Alicia did not reply. She clicked on the browser's search button, typed in Wallace Ingalls's name and went to a website containing the author's biography. She scrolled down the page, scanning important events in his life, hoping to learn more about his extraordinary ability to see into the future. Near the bottom of the page were numerous photographs, one of which was of Ingalls in his early twenties, about the same time he wrote his bestseller.
"It can't be!"
But it was. The man in the photograph was the spitting image of the contestant she knew as Evander Roth, who had gone out to the island only days earlier and had since disappeared. Ingalls knew what would happen on the island because, in a bizarre manner that even he himself could not understand, he had been there.
The image in the upper left corner is of The Nantucket by Charles Wysocki.
Few people know Salem was a contestant on Survivor because he lasted only until dinner time.
