Barely visible through the tatters of Samantha’s wedding dress, as a cluster of small bones, was the dead unborn child who must have been Michael’s third — no, Castle realized suddenly. His second.

“Isn’t that right?” he asked, sitting there on the floor and staring across the room. He had to shout to hear himself over the music. “That’s it, isn’t it? You killed Samantha — one of you did. Was it you, Michael? She found out about the downbelow, didn’t she? She found out about you and Mia — that you’d been fucking your little baby sister for most of her life, the sister you’d told your wife to look like. Is that why you killed her?”

The music rose like it was trying to drown him out, and Castle stood up, flipping open the phone. Nothing. No signal. The display just kept scrolling by, IN THE MEAN TIME — IN BETWEEN TIME –

“It’s Samantha’s handwriting in the journal, right? She copied over the letters? You must have left them laying around somewhere. Was she going to go to a lawyer with them? Or did you just hate it that she knew? That she’d taken your little secret?”

As it had when he took the breakup letter into Mia’s room, the air doubled up, cold and damp, and shoved him. He landed sprawled on the stairs to the middle level, sliding down two of them before he got his bearings and put his feet down. His spine rang with that funny-bone tingle, and he thought there might be a cut at the back of his head.

“Or was it you, Mia? Did Samantha confront you? Did she tell you she was pregnant again? Was she stupid enough to think that gave her an extra claim, that you’d — what — see reason? Slink off to parts unknown? It only made you angrier, didn’t it. Angrier at Michael, who kept telling you he was going to stop sleeping with his wife, right? But you couldn’t take it out on him. So you had to kill her. Is that what happened?” Even thinking about it he felt rage he couldn’t claim to own, a frightening bubble of violence that churned his stomach and pumped his heart, until he didn’t know whether he wanted to throw up or jack off.

Even thrown aside from it, he could see the hidden room clearly, and his memory filled in the nooks and crannies his eyes couldn’t reach.

It was large, with a floor that sloped downwards in all directions, towards the center, where a black iron grate lay, stained with God knows what from God knows when. The ceiling was maybe half again as high as those in most of the rest of the house, and the walls and floor were all exposed stone, stained brown and red in amorphous splotches. There were a number of metal doodads here and there drilled into the wall — the sort of fixtures you’d use to steady machines of some sort.

A distillery? Had Copland made moonshine down here? Or at least stored it? The grate on the floor was wide enough to deal with the occasional burst container that was a common risk in bootlegging. But it had served another purpose later, when the Van Der Lindens came to Domino.

Several of the bodies were hung from the ceiling or on the wall, with hooks and chains that were connected to a series of metal bars that ran the length of the ceiling — for a moment, it reminded Castle of those ladders on runners in some bookstores, the ones that slid along like a trolley but were secured to keep them from toppling. A bed — little more than a cot — and a workbench had been moved in here ages ago, and the sheets had long since been stripped off of the moth-bitten mattress, which might have been white once but had long since been yellowed and leopard-spotted with shit-brown and blood-rust memories.

Samantha’s was not the only corpse: but hers was the only clothed one. She hung on the ceiling exactly opposite from the door, as though watching everything, like a prized trophy or an idol.

The priests were hung up on the hooks, stuck through the soft parts of their throats like fish, their bodies gone dark and waxy in places. Strabo’s was still wet, still dripping ever so slowly, a treacle trickle like a faucet that never shut all the way, a trickle the drain collected. Most of his skin between his neck and waist seemed to have been removed; some of it listed in ragged edges, and a patch remained at his left nipple, making it look starkly, strangely highlighted. Some of the blood was clotted — did that happen after death? Or had he been alive long enough for it to happen?

Katrine was the most recently killed, and Castle would almost bet she was still warm. She was bent over the bed, knees on the floor on the far side from him, head face-down on the mattress in the midst of a brighter, fresher, glossier pool of red. She was naked, her clothes nowhere in sight, and what Castle could see of her back and arms was covered in abrasions, some of them dark red with blood blisters.

#

Samantha made a point of not looking around her as she walked through what the letters had called the downbelow. She wasn’t the wide-eyed Southern flower she’d been when she married Michael, but she knew herself well enough to know she might cry or whimper if she saw the wrong thing. She didn’t want to cry. She didn’t want to whimper. She wanted to be strong, even if she didn’t feel it. She wanted to have the kind of strength Michael had.

She had found a small packet of letters a maid had displaced, and yes, she had given into curiosity and read them even once she determined that they were addressed to Michael and written in feminine hand. When she realized Mia had written them she was relieved — until it became clear that they had been written after she’d died in the house fire, the one that had so bereaved Michael he scarcely came to his marriage bed for over a month.

A month in which this Mia, this sister of his, had been living in a vast basement Samantha hadn’t even known about. The very existence of this downbelow bothered her, disturbed her, as much as the rest: an entire house had been beneath her, and no one had told her. Not the servants — surely they didn’t know? Not even Marcus, the gatehouse guard? No wonder Michael had been so ever insistent on keeping that position staffed, even when their parties became more and more rare.

Had Michael built it? Or had he bought a house equipped with such, for just this purpose? The extra basement did not appear on the house plans — she had checked, surreptitiously.

Had he bought the house to hide his sister in? Had he planned that from the start? He told her he had liked it because of the name, because their wedding reception had been that silly overblown domino ball.

When Samantha confronted Michael with the letters, he had not seemed upset. He had dismissed her concerns. He had called her — patiently, as though disappointed with her — childish and perverse. The letters she’d copied into her journal, he said, were indeed from his sister — many years ago. The content she mistook for sexual was perfectly innocent, and her reading only demonstrated how far she had come from her naive beginnings. Mia had had a strange sense of humor, and their relationship had had many shared jokes, Michael said. Please do not trouble me further by pricking at old and painful memories.

He had not mentioned the downbelow, nor did she ask about it, despite its mention — and Domino’s — in the letters. When she asked about her resemblance to his sister — she had found a photograph of Mia shortly before the woman’s supposed death, and had pasted it into the journal because it was one that particularly highlighted the similarities between them. “I looked like this once,” she’d written above the photograph, “Would you love me if I did not?” It had struck her that that, finally, was why Michael could not love her: she was only a placeholder for Mia. If she looked different, perhaps Michael would have become acquainted with her on her own merits.

Or maybe, as a woman now in her thirties with a daughter just out of her teens, she was simply too old for Michael Van Der Linden.

When he’d left on a business trip shortly after their confrontation, she found herself wondering if he had women elsewhere. If he still seduced girls, perhaps the daughters of business partners, or those poor women who whored themselves in the big cities. She wondered if he owned other houses, with other families. Or if he were content with two.

She dismissed the servants for the week, telling them that with Mr Van Der Linden gone there was simply little call for them, and that they were welcome to enjoy their time as they liked, perhaps with their families. And she spent two days searching for the downbelow before she found it: a hidden door in the gatehouse. It was one of the last places she would have thought to look — it was so far from the rest of the house, whereas she had imagined something central and clever, a shifting fireplace or revolving bookcase, that sort of thing. One too many matinees, Samantha, she scolded herself. How she hated being stupid. She had always prayed that life with Michael would make her smarter, but she always felt three steps behind him, and two behind the rest of the world.

She had not wandered far into the downbelow before realizing there was more than one level to it. It was an entire house below her home! Furnished much the same, and certainly no less lavishly. She looked closely at as little as possible. She was not ready to start thinking of questions such as whether Michael had paid more attention to the furnishing of his downbelow than his Domino: whether he had put all his best things down here in the dark.

I hear such noises at night, Mia had written in one of her letters, and when Samantha copied it, she thought how perfectly it suited her as well. How am I ever to sleep with such noises? They wake me up suddenly — I hear them every time I turn around, it seems — as though I’m followed — as though they come down through the walls — and the visions they give me, the images in my head, you know I cannot stand them, you know what I have done to myself before in trying to rid myself of them, how can you permit me to suffer such things, O Michael my darling? How can we continue to live in this house? Do you not know what it does to me? Do you not see? Why has it been so long since you have come to my bed and comforted me?

Samantha sighed, and even as she stared resolutely ahead, walking towards the stairs, she felt things crumbling in those places she could not keep ignoring. Mia and Michael’s relationship was surely a sexual one. The best she could hope for was that it was unconsummated — that Mia entertained an improper, degenerate lust for her brother, who took pity on the girl’s clear insanity. It was difficult to hope that was the case; difficult to pin wishes on such an unpleasant thing.

She didn’t reach the stairs the way she intended.

From the darkness at her side, outside the river laid down by the incandescence overhead, came her voice, Mia’s voice. Samantha recognized it from those rare times the woman had spoken to her, but the tone was so different, so very different, worlds away even from the acerbic retorts she’d delivered on occasion after a drink too many.

“Greedy. Fucking. Whore.”

Samantha whirled around so fast and startled she almost lost her balance, and for a moment she hated herself as much as Mia must: she saw herself as she must be seen, as weak and timid, frail like tissue paper, all the things she had never wanted to be and had been afraid she’d become.

Looking at Mia was like looking in a funhouse mirror.

She stood in the doorway of what looked like a child’s bedroom, wearing a simple blue summer dress and pristine white ribbons in her hair. Her makeup, even in the dim light, was clearly over-applied, and with her hands on the sides of the doorway as if bracing her, her head canted to one side, she looked much like a rag-doll. They had the same eyes, she and Mia: the same slope of nose, the same forehead, even the same figure.

Have I always looked so much like her?Samantha wondered. Or have we grown towards each other without being aware of it?

“Mia,” she said out loud, and trained her voice to stay calm, to stay steady. Confident was more than she could manage, and she could hope for the lashings of menace that Mia had filled her own throat with. “So.”

“So,” Mia said. “Did he tell you?”

Samantha shook her head. “He denied it. I found letters.”

“Denied it!” Mia tilted her head to the other side, and grinned. “Denied it. Deeeeenied it. De nydit. I see. Are you going to stop fucking my brother now?”

“Are you going to stop fu– are you going to — to stop fucking my husband?” Blast it, Samantha. Be strong.

“He’s mine. He’s always been mine. He’ll always be mine.” She cocked her head forward, as though sniffing for something, as though listening for something, alert and twitching. “Catching pregnant didn’t help you with that last time, little white trash Southern cunt. It won’t help you this time.”

Samantha’s eyes widened, and she murmured, “How did you know?”

“I can smell it on you, you bleeding filthy whore. I can smell the sickness in your breath, the rot between your legs. You think you’ll give him another child? Another dirty bastard like your fucking little slit Patricia?”

“You leave her alone!” Samantha shouted, suddenly finding her voice. “You leave Patricia out of this!”

“Oh, I will,” Mia said. “She’s nothing to do with this, is she?” She cocked her head again and hissed, like a wild cat. “What is that? What’s that — that looking? What’s that seeing?”

The confrontation wasn’t going the way Samantha had hoped. Mostly she had hoped to discover that Michael was right — that somehow, he hadn’t lied, or had lied about only the least important things. Maybe she had wanted Mia to see her, to apologize, or explain, or — she didn’t know. She just didn’t know. What could possibly have come from this? What could possibly happen now? She would divorce Michael, she supposed, and it would be in all the newspapers. Or she would simply return to her parents’ home, and live apart from him.

“What is that?” Mia asked again, sounding frantic now, almost panicked, looking around wildly. “What did you bring with you? Won’t Bluebeard’s wife ever learn?”

“What are you –”

Mia leapt on her, like a pouncing cat, not clawing her or shrieking but simply pushing her to the ground, grabbing her head with both hands, and slamming it into the floor. “Filthy cunt!” she screamed. “Filthy fucking thieving cunt!” She straddled Samantha and pushed her head down again, slapping her across the face, tearing at her dress and hair. “Dirty dirty cunt!”

Samantha struggled beneath the woman, who was surprisingly strong — but still weaker than Michael, with whom Samantha had had to struggle on more than one occasion, albeit with other goals. She brought a leg up to leverage her and rolled over, pushing Mia away but making the mistake of not continuing to grapple, not pinning the other woman down.

Mia took advantage of the error instantly, swinging her bare foot hard into Samantha’s stomach, and then scampered away, into one of the other rooms off the hallway.

Samantha groaned, clutching herself, wondering if the woman had hurt the baby any — and as she got to her feet, Mia screeched, running at her again with a large black iron in hand –

#

“So you killed her!” Castle shouted, as the music droned on and the — the — not “vision,” exactly, but the waking dream, the experience, the phantasm — faded. “You killed your brother’s wife, and you killed your niece or nephew.”

He’d made his way up the stairs to the top floor of the downbelow, where the large winding staircase was, the one that had so frightened him the first time he came down here, when the flashlight had rolled back towards him.

But the staircase wasn’t here anymore. It looked like an ordinary top floor, albeit one without windows. Where the staircase had been, there was now only wall. He ignored that, not trusting his eyes anymore, and continued, “So what? So fucking what? You killed someone. Who hasn’t? Why haven’t you killed me?”

The question was out before he knew he was going to ask it — before he knew it was there to be asked — but immediately it resonated with him. The house had killed Katrine, the priests, McCall, the servants — everyone except him and Romaglio, and Romaglio was in motherfucking Rome and maybe a little batshit.

“I’m right fucking here, you fuckass loonies! Right here, Castle Howdy Motherfucker Finch! What’re you keeping me alive for? What the fuck do you need from me?”

The doors all blew closed simultaneously, and the bedroom mirrors shattered.

#

Mia wrapped the ribbons around Samantha’s mouth and face, over and over again, finally looping them down around her neck and yanking again. The bitch’s hands and feet were already trussed up with wire, and Mia could smell the blood from where that wire had cut and sliced, teaching the little slut whore not to struggle so much. It smelled like meat, the blood — like metal and meat.

She rolled Samantha over on the bed, looking down at those weepy, weak, rabbit-wide eyes, those fucking piss-breath eyes, those willowy eyes with their big scared whites and their dark little pupils. The little pussy was all the things Michael had always told her not to be. All the things Michael couldn’t stand. Oh, he’d be so happy. So happy that Mia had cleaned out this wound for him.

The girl-bride-bitch-whore groaned a deep, wet groan like the tidal breath of screams as Mia leaned against her, shoving her hand into the bitch’s cunt so the knife could reach. The groan died out so gradually it was beautiful: like a radio with the volume knob slowly, slowly, slowly turned lower, lower, lower.

Was she going to kill Samantha? She couldn’t remember if she had meant to. She wanted the baby out, wanted the baby dead, and slashed and hacked and ripped at the bridegirl’s thighs. But the bridegirl bitchqueen slutcunt seemed to be dead, tongue thick in her mouth, and if the mother was dead the child would never be born. When she was young and in Sunday school she asked once why the Pharaoh and Herod had singled out the children instead of the mothers. The teacher had threatened to spank her, but told Father instead — and he sent her to her room immediately after meals every day for a week, which meant she didn’t get to see Michael.

Just like Samantha had kept her from Michael.

Well, no more. She’d surprise him. She wouldn’t have to stay in the downbelow any more. She wouldn’t have to stay in the dark. Mia Van Der Linden might be dead, but the world already had open arms for Samantha Van Der Linden. Maybe she wouldn’t even tell Michael. They looked so much alike — with the right makeup — style her hair differently — was it too long? it might be too long — and the right clothes, a few days to gain a couple pounds and hope it went to the hips — she could easily pass for Samantha. Easily. No one would ever know. No one needed to know. How might Michael treat her differently, thinking she was his ladywife devilbitch?

The old passageway the bootleggers had used was still there. Michael had closed it up, but she’d opened it again. She could dispose of Samantha’s body in the lake. Cut it up into little pieces no one would ever identify. She could keep the face and fingerprints, and even if the body was found no one would ever guess it was Mrs Fuckass Bitch Samantha Slut Cunt Van Der Linden.

She looked up suddenly — had she heard footsteps? Had Michael come home already? Did he know to look for her in the changing room — as she called the room they’d converted from the old bootlegger’s cubby hole — or had Samantha left him a note?

“Who’s there?” she called. “Michael? Darling, is that you? Goofo?”

#

“I get it!” Castle called out, wandering back down the stairs. “I get it, you got me, I’m trapped! So what, I was already trapped! You haven’t killed me yet — is this the part where you toy with me? Scare me? Jesus, we’ve had enough of that. I’m fucking frightened, okay? Does that turn you on? Great, good. Let’s get it over with.”

He was starting to feel idiotic. Oh, not for talking to the house, exactly, but for running around and shouting. Just because the house was haunted, or what the fuck ever it was, didn’t mean it understood him, or even heard him. You could shout at a bear who was kicking around your campsite, but that didn’t mean the bear would listen to reason.

But he was shouting to distract it, if there was an it to distract. All he was learning from — from whatever was going on — was that Mia and Michael were just as fucked up as they could be, making the Finches look like the Osmonds. Or the Osbornes, at least.

That, and that there was a passageway from the downbelow to the lake or somewhere near it. Of course: the lake was fed by the river, and the river had been used for trading back in the day. You could make it out to Boston Harbor by boat — maybe not anymore, with all the building that’d gone on and everything, but you sure as hell could have at one point. Perfect for a bootlegger with New York connections. Like taking the back road.

Did that mean he had a way out?

He didn’t know how the alarm worked — if it was a perimeter breach sort of thing, or a leash thing: whether it would go off when he got a certain distance away, or when he passed an invisible line. If it was the latter, the passageway might work — and it seemed reasonable to assume it was, because just being in the downbelow at the lowest level would be further from the alarm system than any other point in the house, and then some.

Maybe more importantly, it was the only way out of the downbelow now except for through Mia’s bedroom, and he had a feeling he didn’t want to go in there.

“What is it you want from me? You want to play with me?” He grabbed the gun off the floor on his way back to the abattoir Mia called the changing room, and bit down an urge to gag. “You want to toss me around some more? What’re you waiting for, huh?”

The moment he passed it, the cell phone rang, a sharp, metallic ring — the kind phones used to have when ringers were bells and not electronics or downloaded polyphonic ringtones. He picked it up and flipped it open, and the voice on the other end came instantly, undeniably female despite the harsh hornet-like buzz of static.

“I want your cock.”

#

Michael’s fingers hurt after he backhanded her, a pain that tingled in all the wrong places, and he filed away a worry that he might have suffered a light sprain. Now was not the time to consider that: now was not the time to show the face of concern. For now, Mia needed to understand that she had overstepped her bounds for the very last time.

He’d waited three nights after he came home to find her prancing around Domino in Samantha’s things, not just her clothes but her style, her hair, her scent, her essence. The servants didn’t seem to notice, or were simply close-mouthed Yankees who would never acknowledge what they saw. But Michael knew right away. He knew because Samantha had never shown such strength, exuded such passion, and she had never once — no matter his attempts at training her — behaved as Mia did in bed.

The sex was interesting, from a scientific point of view. It was not like sex with Mia normally was. It was nothing like sex with Samantha had ever been. It was, he supposed, a syncretic blend of Mia attempting to imagine what Samantha was like as a lover — while Samantha’s own bedroom behavior was, in essence, her ability to follow the instructions Michael had given her, based on Mia’s proclivities and skills.

Even if he had not recognized his sister in his wife’s clothes like a wolf in sheep’s, he would have recognized the feel of her cunt, the taste of her throat, the curve of her tits. No perfume could hide the difference in smells. No amount of insight into the character of an admittedly simple woman could conjure up the proper responses to touch and tongue.

He fucked her until he spent himself, and then he hit her twice, once with a full fist in the stomach, and the second time with the back of his hand across her jaw. Despite the pain, he was satisfied with the sound her mouth had made when he connected, and with the burst of shock on her face, that calm in the sky before the storm of her weeping.

“Stupid bitch,” he said quietly, getting up and putting his robe on. “Did you think you had me fooled? Did you think I did not know you?”

“Michael — darling husband –”

He shot her a glance he had conditioned her to when she was still too young to be fucked. “Do not attempt to toy with me further, Mia. What had you intended to do when I eventually came to the downbelow to visit you? Had you meant to head me off there, to play both roles, like some — like some goddamn movie?”

“I remember a movie,” she said quietly, so quietly he could barely hear her. “I remember The Scarecrow of Oz. I remember a movie about a cruel king who would not let his daughter marry as she wished.”

He’d forgotten for a moment: she hadn’t seen a movie in over a decade. She had loved them so much as a girl, and the tinge of sadness he felt was, he decided, the result of missing the girl she had been — the giving, generous girl, not this thieving bitch she had become. “Where is Samantha, Mia?” he asked. “Where has she gone?”

Mia sobbed, and shook her head, and that was all the answer he needed. The girl was dead, then. Well, he would trust to Mia’s ability to clean up after herself: she had had plenty of experience in that, and knew the critical importance of being tidy.

“Do you know,” he asked quietly, rage seething in him as he walked to the bathroom, where he had already drawn a bath for his usual post-coital soak, “just how much work you have created for me? Do you know how business will suffer? The servants, you may have fooled, however briefly: but great Scott, Mia, Patricia will be home from Radcliffe at the holidays — and that is assuming that she does not surprise us with one of her ‘delightful’ impromptu weekend visits. Do you consider yourself prepared to fool my daughter into believing you’re her mother? Do you speak the secret language of mother and daughter, that takes a lifetime to build, a tower of idioms the full signification of which is only determined in retrospect, in mourning? You silly, impulsive twat.”

“This isn’t what I want,” Mia murmured on the bed, as if to herself. “This isn’t how I want it to happen. This isn’t how I want it to happen. This isn’t how I want it to happen.”

“No,” Michael said as he picked up the ivory-handled straight razor from the marble countertop. “I shouldn’t imagine it is. But you need to be punished, dear.”

#

“I want your cock,” the voice said, when Castle remembered again that he was holding the telephone, “and I want it now. Now. Now. Or else. Or else you’ll be lost forever. I want your cock. I need your cock. Give me your cock. Do you understand? Give it to me. Give it to me. You know I want it. You know I need it. Make me wet.”

#

Michael came closer to her, and she closed her eyes, not looking at him. None of this is real, she told herself. It’s all nonsense. It’s nothing but nonsense. It’s nothing but the downbelow. Walk through the looking glass. Through the looking glass. Through the looking glass. Walk through the looking glass.

“I’m tired of being Samantha, Michael,” she told him, and she remembered telling him that, the first time this happened, when it happened and she was alone, alone with Michael and the razor, she remembered telling him this. But this time she wasn’t alone. “I’m tired of being someone else. Why don’t I be you now? Why don’t you be me?”

“Games later, little girl,” he said mildly, and she didn’t think he was actually paying attention to her. “Work first, play later.”

She opened her eyes to watch his reflection recede in the mirror on the bathroom door, as he came closer, and shook her head. “I can’t be angry at you, Michael. I can’t ever be angry at you, you know that.”

He smiled, and lowered the razor for a moment. “Yes, sweetheart, I know. You know I’m only doing this for your own good. You can’t be angry at me for that.”

“That’s right,” she said. “I brought someone else to be angry for me.”

#

The doorway to the changing room wasn’t a doorway anymore: it was a mirror, a looking glass, and Castle’s reflection wasn’t in it. The phone was gone, or he’d forgotten what it felt like to hold it — some nonverbal communication had passed between him and Mia, and that rage had filled him again, that urge, that vomiting hard-on. He didn’t remember stepping through the mirror, but he knew he was on its other side when the light went different, and Mia stood in front of him with a straight razor, trembling, splotches of sweat beaded up on her forehead.

“What –” he asked, and she shook her head.

“I’m Michael Van Der Linden,” she said, and God was she gorgeous. That cruel, clever mouth, those dark eyes. He’d never been with a woman who looked remotely like her. He wasn’t sure she’d ever met a woman who looked remotely like her. “Do you understand?” she asked, panic in her voice like she was aware that he was constantly on the verge of slipping away. “I’m Michael Van Der Linden, and don’t call me anything else. Don’t call me anything else. I’m Michael, and you need to do what needs doing.”

“Work first,” he said. “Play later.”

“Show neck,” she said, “and show teeth. Hurry — I think I want to hurt you, and I might kill you.”

He knocked the razor from her hand when she raised it, and grabbed her hair, dragging her down to the ground. “No,” he said, “No, Michael, you won’t.”

“You have to be Mia,” she whispered, writhing against him as he pushed her into the bathroom after kicking the razor far away. “You have to be Mia, Mia Van Der Linden, Mia’s dead so long and nobody’s left to be her because she’s so busy down the rabbit-hole, so busy being Samantha, and God –”

“– it’s no use now,” he finished for her, “to pretend to be two people. Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person.”

“Yes,” she said, and he pushed her down on the floor, bending her over and lifting her robe, “God, yes. Don’t forget –” She looked timid for a moment, just a moment, as she raised a hand to her ass.

“I know,” he said, and rubbed his cock between her cheeks as he grabbed a handful of her hair, his knuckles close to her scalp. “You’re Michael Van Der Linden. You don’t have a cunt. And I’m Mia — I’m Mia Van Der Linden, and it’s about goddamn time I fucked you, Michael, isn’t it?”

She groaned as he pushed his cock into her ass, and the groan became a gurgle when he shoved her head down into the tub water.

For minutes, there was no sound except skin slapping against skin, intermittent wet gasps, and a duet of groans, neither of which sounded anything like his own voice. I’m Mia Van Der Linden, he kept thinking, and the thought of it did make him hard, made him feel — not more powerful, exactly, but powerful in a new way, like finding a whole new flavor of ice cream, a basic, primal one: not avocado or rum ripple, but chocolate, strawberry. I’m Mia Van Der Linden, and Michael is my bitch.

When he came, he felt a sudden dissonance, a sudden disconcertedness — as though he’d come in two people at once, and had come as two people at once. He felt both the wonder of feeling an orgasming cock from the first-person perspective, and the momentary revulsion of wondering whose ass he’d just pulled his dick from. And then he stumbled backwards, the surface of the mirror cool and smooth against his skin.

#

Mia gasped, laying back on the bed with a hand on her breast, holding rags there to stop the bleeding. She felt quivery and full of bees, like she couldn’t sit still, like she wanted to laugh and hoot. Michael had cut her — oh, God, how he had cut her — but the fact that he hadn’t killed her meant everything would be all right. Everything would be just fine.

And for a moment — for a moment there — she had imagined things entirely differently, imagined Michael’s head shoved down into his precious bath, and a nice big cock between her legs to shove into him — oh, for a moment it had all been so wonderful, so very wonderful.

Had she dreamed it, she wondered — or had it dreamed her?

#

Castle reached out a hand to steady himself as he stumbled through the changing room, and it landed on one of the dead priests, whose skin felt too soft, too cool, too human. He leaned forward, breathing heavily and deeply to stifle the urge to throw up. The door was obvious — he didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it right away. The bed had been pushed in front of it, and he concentrated on not thinking as he moved Katrine — gently at first, and more urgently when he caught a glimpse of her face — and then kicked the bed over.

The door was the simplest sort, with no knob, just one of those rings you pull. Beyond, a wide tunnel like the ones in ballparks, with railings and a gentle slope, perfect for rolling a cart of whiskey up.

He glanced behind him, and his reflection held a straight razor, doing things to himself with it that Castle knew intellectually could be survived, but that he hoped he’d never test. Domino didn’t want him to leave. Whether it was haunted by the Van Der Lindens — or only one of them — or their victims — or had just absorbed the stains and stink of so much badness, he didn’t know. But it didn’t want him to leave, even if it had shown him the door.

It was night out. At the end of the tunnel, he could see the smallest, shimmering sliver of moonlight against the lake. Would the alarm go off? Would Domino stop him before he reached the end of the tunnel? Would he even know if he’d left, or would all his Samanthas be traded for Mias?

He started walking down the slope, pulling himself forward by the railings as though hiking a steep mountain, and he could smell the lake, that rich smell of algae and sand and the bright slithery green seaweed with the little pods you could pop between your fingers. He could hear it lapping against the shore, and the splish-splash of waterbugs, the far-off moot of loons.

Most of the big shore places would be closed at this hour, and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat arcade for summerfolk. As the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually he became aware of the horizon, the fresh crest of the new world, with its vanished trees, blue lawns, and dark fields. He stepped out of the darkness and into the shadows, and his phone rang again, a simple electronic jingle from a Gap commercial: the digital display said CALLER UNKNOWN, and the signal light was green.

He flipped it open as he bent down to feel the water against his fingertips and the outdoors against his skin, admiring his reflection in the shimmering black and giggling a little to himself. The voice on the phone was old and familiar, like a voice you’ve imagined from favorite books. The house loomed behind him, half of it hidden in the earth, the other half blocking the sky.

“Welcome to the circus, Sebastian.”

###

In a house full of hundreds of precise clocks, Castle had no idea what time it was. None of them seemed to say the same thing; the digital readouts in the seconds columns weren’t even ticking off at the same speed. His three cell phones told him three different things, and calling the “at the tone, the time will be” lady gave him different results every time. It was just past dawn. It was the middle of the afternoon. It was last week.

Whatever time it was, it took probably hours for him to clean up the bodies from the living room. He didn’t know what else to do with them. Every time he dialed 911, he got a Muzak version of “Ain’t We Got Fun.” Anyone else he could call, they’d think he did it. Besides, cleaning them up was a way to convince himself they were real — that McCall and the last two servants of Domino had been killed, that blood had soaked through a carpet worth five digits and splattered all that tasteful green.

He put them in Hefty bags first, triple-bagged, but they were still so wet, and the bags started to squelch whenever he shifted one or added another piece of someone.

So he laid sheets of plastic down on the carpet, since it was already ruined anyway, and put the bags on top of the plastic and hastily filled them with what he could find — fingers shorn off of hands, pieces of face, larger body parts that hadn’t been broken or shattered or slurped upon — and then started making trips up to the second-floor bathroom, the one with the bathtub that he hadn’t had a chance to board back up.

The blood, he thought, would be the issue. So he’d run a bath, rinse as much of the blood as he could, and let everything … drain.

There had to be a limit to how much blood there was, right?

Eventually it would all swirl away.

Bag by bag, cursing whenever something dripped, he brought the piece upstairs to rinse in the clawfoot tub, leaving the drain unplugged to sluice everything off, and eventually he started switching pieces out — taking soggy, wrinkled hands and legs out of the tub, squeezing more pink from them, and putting them in fresh Hefty bags to make room for another torso or head that needed washing.

Probably hours passed.

He used wire cutters to cut the carpet into smaller squares and dumped them in the largest of the washing machines, the one that handled blankets and towels and the like, running several cycles with lots of bleach and detergent, being careful not to overload the unit.

Blood splatters cleaned off the walls easily enough, but a number of paintings — and in some cases, just the frames — had to be disposed of, as did the bulk of the living room furniture. He envisioned several different plans — he could chop it all up into smaller, innocuous pieces, and either burn them — bit by bit — over a long period of time, in one of the fireplaces. Or he could add an extra bag of trash to the outgoing, every day until it was all gone.

Eventually he decided that letting the blood leave the house in any form — even as smoke — was risky. He soaked up the puddles where he found them, and dried the damp spots, and covered everything in tarps left over from when he had moved in, before moving everything up to one of the third-floor storerooms. By the time he was done, every muscle felt like stretched catgut, he’d taken off his shirt after soaking it through, and sweat made the coppery stains he’d accumulated run rusty.

Probably more hours passed.

Eventually the living room was bare but for the few pieces of furniture which were easily cleaned — the windowside table of glass and metal, the well-varnished coffee table, the mahogany bookcase which caught only a backsplash — and a few bundles of towels he’d add to the washer once it had recovered from the several loads of carpet. At the moment, it had been so overworked it was painfully hot to the touch, and he didn’t want to break it at such an inconvenient time.

He wondered if he might be in shock.

The garden was already dug up, so he buried the body parts there, in and among the carefully placed rocks and the decorative flowers. The garden was indoors, so there was no danger of a neighbor dog digging up McCall’s skull or Andrea Jenkins’ femur. It was outdoors, which would diffuse the smell. He lit half a dozen 72-hour citronella candles and made a mental note to keep replenishing them.

The garden was the only place where he could find natural light or so much as a hint of the outdoors. Domino was sealed up, with the windows looking in on themselves and the loft telescope gone blind, but here the roof was open to the sky. It was light out when he was done, the light of a dawn caught red-handed, and he fell asleep with the shovel sticking into the ground next to him, soil prickling his cheeks, black plastic shining from patches he hadn’t covered up well enough.

#

Sometime in the night, with the half-conscious half-rational fidgets like those of rolling over in his sleep or turning out a light after dozing off accidentally, he crawled down the hole to the downbelow, crawled down the rabbit hole to Mia’s bedroom. His face was chafed, his nails torn and ragged, and his muscles badly missed deep-tissue massages and eucalyptus oils, with all of their tension gathering up in the small of his back like a hot knot of pig-iron.

In a room like a little girl’s, still sharp with the tang of anticoagulants and protein-dissolving cleansers, he slept a deep, comforted sleep, and many times in the day and the night that followed he would have woken up if not for the calming, soothing touch of a hand on the back of his neck, and of cool clean skin against his filthiness.

In the arms of another he slept, and perchance dreamt, all the while the mirrors unquiet like many frantic eyes.

#

The wedding reception of Michael Van Der Linden and Samantha Montgomery took the form of a masquerade ball, a tradition long upheld by the Van Der Linden clan and connected in some fashion to their old and vague nobility. All except the bride, groom, and their parents attended in domino garb: loose Venetian cloaks easily worn over any formal outfit, with a mask that covered the upper half of the face. The name had originally referred to the man who wore the outfit, an entertainer of sorts, a harlequin, a circus performer: “Domino” meant “to the lord,” and whether it was a reference to a vassal’s service or to the old “fools for God” sermons, Michael did not know. The game of tiles was named after the sort of shiftless, ambitionless men who had first played it — “to make domino” still meant “to see the end coming,” especially among the Boston Brahmins who so prided themselves on keeping their speech untouched by a world of automobiles and alternating current.

But very quickly the word doubled for the outfit as well as the soul within it, and more and more frequently in these modern times, people used “domino” to refer to the mask rather than the outfit entire: Michael blamed the Lone Ranger and Zorro for this, as both wore the mask but never — or in Zorro’s case, rarely — the cloak. In a proper world, a domino mask should no more be called simply “a domino” than should a cowboy hat be called a cowboy.

Michael accepted many a dance, and kept his eye on a girl in a dark green cloak and purple mask, a girl with a cruel twist of a mouth who danced with any man who asked, even the ones visibly drunk who used the anonymity of the masquerade to sneak gropes and grinds. He didn’t ask to dance with her, but waited for her to come to him.

The night waxed on, and when Samantha seemed to tire, Michael spoke to her in a low, confidential voice. “My young love,” he said, because for all her expertly applied makeup and the beauty of her dress she was still no more than a girl, “are you bothered by my dancing with all these women? I have done so more than enough to satisfy family tradition. We could retire.”

She shook her head as he knew she would, and smiled at him with a weariness which made her seem years older, nearly twenty. “It’s nothing but a barn-dance, sugar. For all the frills, it’s nothing but a round-and-round. You go on, I surely don’t want a grudge held against us by some poor woman who wasn’t able to dance with my groom.”

He kissed her hand and returned to the dance floor as the band struck up “Ain’t We Got Fun,” and the girl in green came to him.

“A dance, oh groom?” she asked, and he recognized Mia’s voice immediately, and the calm anger behind it.

“Of course, dear lady.” He bowed slightly to her and took her hand as they danced with a rhythm all their own, one which acknowledged the music without needing it.

Every morning

Every evening

Don’t we got fun

Twins and cares dear

Come in pairs dear

Don’t we have fun

“Isn’t a groom a man who cares for horses?” she asked quietly, mouth near his ear.

“Be kind, dear lady. It is my bride’s night.”

“Yes, she’s soon to foal, I hear. I wonder how much longer she will want the attentions of her stallion?” Mia’s hand, hidden — at least some — by the two of them dancing and the looseness of her cloak, slid over the front of his trousers.

“Mia –”

“Ah,” she said, and her nail found the back of his neck, tracing across it. “So you knew me for myself.”

“Better than you know yourself,” he murmured back, “but I must insist on some decorum.”

“By all means,” she said, finding him with her fingers, “insist.”

“Sister –”

She stroked him harder, and turned him so he was facing his bride, exchanging pleasantries with the Chicago Van Der Lindens. “Will she bear many children for you, Rabbit?” she asked, as he stiffened at her touch and she rubbed him with palm and fingertips. “Will your daughters replace your sisters? Have I grown too old for you?”

“Darling — you must stop. Someone will see.”

“None can see, Goofo,” she whispered, “none but one, and I think I have only dreamed him.”

Michael couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, though, and started to push her away, but she resisted fervently enough that there was no way to disengage himself from her without drawing attention.

She wouldn’t stop rubbing him, and he was sure every eye followed the movements of her elbow. “Is this how it will be? You at the center, with your puppybitch? Me at the fringe, everyone wondering what to do with me? Is this how it will be, Michael, after I’ve waited for you to come back from the war, wondering if you’d die in Europe without me?” She ground her palm against him, and he gasped in pain.

“You forget yourself, little sister,” he murmured, so quietly he could barely hear himself. Michael Van Der Linden was not a man who ever shouted. Where other men felt that urge, he had silence. “Mind you your place.”

She nipped his earlobe and let a single drop of blood coat her tongue. “Remind me of it,” she whispered against his throat. “Show me to it.”

Moments later he took her in a changing closet by the swimming pool, slapping her across the collarbone where no one but her maid would see the marks, dragging his nails across her pristine thighs and back, and rutting with her like the humping, grunting little dog she was. They rejoined the party not long after, once he’d refreshed himself with a washcloth and cologne, and when he took his new wife to bed he assumed she would be too young and ill-experienced to recognize the smell of another woman on him.

Night or day-time

It’s all play-time

Ain’t we got fun

#

Castle recognized the disconnected feeling from the days when he did more drugs than lately. He felt grey and hazy, as though the things he did were not entirely done by him. How long had he spent disposing of the dead bodies? He was still sore, and every movement was stiff and marionettish, but he didn’t feel like he owned the soreness.

In the downbelow, there were no windows and few mirrors.

The passage from the garden had led at an angle — like a slide, but not as steep, and easy to climb in either direction — to an innocuous trap door in Mia’s bedroom, by the far side of her bed. It was easy enough to crawl into when standing on the bed, and easy to make one’s way through in the dark.

Someone had been with him in the night. Katrine, maybe — he had never fully woken up, but had been sure of a female presence, a female breath against his skin. Maybe she’d never left the house after all. Maybe something had happened to her the way it had happened to him.

And he’d dreamed about –

No.

He’d dreamed as Michael. He wasn’t even sure “dream” was the right word, because he couldn’t quite tell if he’d been asleep at the time — only that the experience fell sometime between when he crawled down the passageway into Mia’s room and when he got out of bed to take a leak, that early morning instinct that kicked in long before he came to himself enough to know how he should be feeling.

He sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette from the pack Katrine had left behind, taking a deep drag off of it and stifling the urge to cough. He’d quit smoking a while ago, and hadn’t smoked religiously in a few years — but he’d always seen it as the sort of thing he’d come back to some day, when he needed it. He took a few puffs and stubbed it out in Katrine’s half-full ashtray, chasing the aftertaste with a gulp of Scotch, and then wandered out into the hallway, where he thought the reception might be better.

There was a moment, just a moment, when he couldn’t remember the number, and the phone he had on him only had west coast numbers in memory. But then it came to him, and while he waited through three rings before she picked up — she never picked up before the third ring — he mentally crossed his fingers that the call would go through and stay through, at least long enough to talk.

“Hello hello,” she said, and he smiled in the near-dark.

“Hi Jen. It’s Castle.”

“Castle!” she shouted, and then giggled. “Oh geez. Sorry. I just — I haven’t talked to you in — in how long? In months! Where are you? How are you? Why haven’t you visited?” It was so strange hearing her, on two levels: one, because her voice was so unlike what it had been before her husband blew the two of them up — child-like, but not like it had actually been when she was a child; two, because she was so solidly and vividly a part of his life before Domino.

“Oh Jen, I’ve just been busy, you know.”

“Uh huh. Are you going to visit soon?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. How have you been? What have you been doing?”

“I play video games now. I don’t think I played them much before, did I?”

“No, not that I recall. Not very much.”

“Well, I do now.” She sounded worried, and her voice turned faint for a minute as though she’d forgotten to keep it close while she talked, something she did sometimes. “I hope that’s okay. I want to stay being like me. I know everyone misses me.”

“Honey, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like that. Like that. You didn’t used to talk to me like that. Calling me honey. With your voice like silver and elevens. You used to talk to me different, when I wasn’t stupid.”

“You aren’t stupid.” Anger boiled up. “You are not stupid, Jennifer.”

“But I’m how I am. And that’s enough to make me different from how I used to am.”

“Different isn’t worse, sweetheart.”

“Now you’re sweethearting!” she shrieked, but quickly calmed down. “Now you’re sweethearting. That’s what I mean. Remember you used to call me shithead? I’m different and you don’t. And I play video games, but Castle I like them. I like them and is that okay? I don’t want to be different. Not when I don’t have to be. Like I keep my hair the same. When it grew back I made them cut it the way it was before. So I’d be as same as I could be. Castle, you need to come see me, you need to come visit, you need to remind me what I’m like.”

“Well, maybe I’ll be there soon, but what video games are you playing?”

“Grand Theft Auto Vice City From Rockstar Games,” she said, as though it were all the title, “and The Sims: Livin Large Expansion Pack From Maxis.”

“Well see, there you go. Those video games weren’t around before. Maybe you would have played them, see? If you could have.”

“Oh!” she squealed. “Oh Castle I’ll bet you’re right! I’ll bet you are, Castle Finch! See? See why I need you?”

He grinned, and flipped the safety off of the handgun. “I wish I could be there now, Jen, I’d play video games with you.”

“Would you take me to the circus?”

He stopped, and leaned against the wall, closing his eyes. “Jennifer, I don’t go to the circus. You know that.”

“Because that’s where your dad died?”

“Yeah.”

“But aren’t you with him now?”

“… what?”

“Aren’t you dead? Jonathan told me, yesterday, he said Castle’s dead. And that was why you hadn’t called me.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“I think if you’re dead it would probably be all right to go to the circus, and they have elephants.”

“It’s — Jen, I’m not dead. Believe me.” He looked down at the gun. “Believe me, I’m not dead. Okay?”

She didn’t say anything for a long time, and he expected the hissing to come back, or the voices. “Do you hear that?” she asked.

“What?”

“Singing. In the mean time — in between time — ain’t we got fun –”

“Ah, geez. Just ignore it, Jen. I’m going to have to go soon.”

“‘Kay. But first, Castle? Castle? Castle?”

“Yeah — yeah, Jen, what?”

“Castle, we have to talk.”

“Kiddo, we are talking.”

“No, I mean — in my head — where I’m not playing the video games — in the hard place? There are thoughts, things, I need to talk to you.” She sounded agitated, and started to slur.

“Okay, hey, calm down. Remember, if you get too upset, the doctor is going to make you hang up.”

“Okay. Okay. Cabbage time.”

“What?” But it rang a bell.

“The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things. Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax –”

“Of cabbages,” he finished for her, “and kings.” It was still Jen’s voice on the other end, though. Not Michael’s, Mia’s, the house’s, whoever it was he’d been hearing. Still, the sudden Alice reference made him nervous, jittery, and he found himself pacing the hallway.

“I think you haven’t been happy with who you are,” she said, every word enunciated like it came with effort. “I think it’s okay because you aren’t who you are. I think it’s like — what it is — we’re all different to different people. Not just ‘I’m your sister,’ or ‘I’m someone’s friend,’ or ‘I used to be a wife,’ but I mean: I’m smarter with you than with David, before David died. I’m funnier with Teddy –”

“You’re funnier with Teddy than with me?” he asked, surprised.

“Teddy and I laugh all the time. All the time. We’re all jokes.”

“We tell jokes. You and me. We’ve had our laughs.”

“Oh Castle.”

“What?”

“Castle, you’ve always been so sad. So so sad. It’s a different kind of funny when I’m around you. It’s a different kind of Jennifer.”

“Oh.” He sat down on the lowest-level stairs, one hand on the phone, the other fingering the gun absently.

“Maybe you’re not as sad with other people. Maybe you weren’t as sad with Rachael. But you were sad with me even before I was in the accident. Even before then. Even when we were kids. You always thought you were so much older than me, but you’re only six years older. Only six. That isn’t very much.”

“No. No, I guess it’s not.”

“The problem is — do you remember what I was talking about?”

“About — how we’re different people. Remember?”

“I remember,” she said confidently. “I wanted to make sure you did, and hadn’t gotten wrapped up in being sad again. The important thing is don’t think you’re someone else.”

“Someone else what?”

“Someone besides who you are. If you’re clever with Jennifer and happy with Rachael and angry with Jonathan, that’s who you are. That isn’t a mask. Or if it is, then there’s only masks. There isn’t a Castle who’s pretending to be those things. There isn’t a Castle in the sky looking down on the Castle in your life. That’s what I tell myself all the time. Stop trying to be the Jennifer who isn’t the Jennifer I am.”

“That sounds like pretty good advice, Jen,” he said, only half-listening as he noticed something.

“See, there you go, you’re being sad again.”

“Sorry about that. I guess it’s how I am — how I am with you, then.” One of the store room doors down here wasn’t closed all the way. It had been the last time he’d been down here, he was positive, because the last time was when the exorcists were there.

He got up, leaving the gun behind, and opened the door the rest of the way. Some of the boxes at the back of the room had been moved aside — all the boxes were out of order, moved away from the walls like someone had been looking for something. And at the back of the room, starkly polished and standing out against the dust-coverage of the rest of the room, was a door, with a key still in its lock.

“I don’t know if I can keep talking to you when you’re so sad,” Jen said. “It makes my head hurt.”

“Honey, I’m sorry — things are — it’s. I’m sorry. I am. I’m not trying to be sad with you.”

“Well, I’m going to let you go,” she said, and he would have grinned on any other day, because the phrase was so Old Jen, exactly the way she ended every telephone conversation. “I don’t want to be around sadness right now.”

He only needed a brief look at the key to recognize it: it was the key from the circus tent, the key from the music box. “I don’t blame you, I really don’t.”

The door swung open easily, and he found Katrine. And Cardinal Baroni. And Allan Ramsey. And Piero Strabo. And a dozen others he’d never recognize unless there were drivers’ licenses in the pockets of the several who wore tatters over their moldy meat-wrapped bones.

For a moment, just a moment, like that hum as your eyes adjust to darkness or sudden light, he was sure he saw his father, too, head hollowed out into cotton candy; and Rachael, cold and still on warm moist blankets; Ingrid, with her head split open where it’d hit the wall; Grace, wet and dripping and blue. For a moment he saw his mother, and Jennifer, and Romaglio and Reynolds — for a moment he saw too much.

Hanging on the far wall like a mounted animal, like a cathedral crucifix, was the one body he was pretty sure he could identify, and it hit him like a hand on his throat, like footsteps on the roof: he knew the dress from the Van Der Linden wedding photographs, and he knew the handiwork from Pasmore’s murder. It had to be Samantha. It had to be Michael’s child-bride.

“Castle?” Jen asked.

“… Jen. What?” He almost forgot where he’d left his voice. The bodies smelled. Not like rot — or maybe rot was part of it, but that wasn’t how it registered — but like heavy sweat and body odor and thick rich blood and shit and piss. They smelled like everything expelled by life, but there was no doubting they were dead.

There was no doubting he was the last one left in a house in which he was not at all alone, and somehow it was only then that he remembered that Jennifer was dead.

“Castle,” Jen asked, “do you remember when Rachael died? Do you remember that? Is that why you’re sad?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, Jen. Oh Jesus. Oh fuck. I have to go. I have to go. I can’t talk right now. I can’t tell what’s real, I don’t know if this is even you.”

The pause on the other end extended for a long time that he remained convinced was Jen’s time, Jen’s pause, before the house cut in in its sickly little sinister fucking singsong: “‘If I wasn’t real,’ Alice said — half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous — ‘I shouldn’t be able to cry.’”

He staggered backwards out of the hidden room, the air around him stinking like a bleeding locker room, and fell on his ass, face wet and eyes blurry as he dropped the phone.

Music streamed from the walls, from the ceiling, from everywhere, like a good stereo system:

Just to make their trouble nearly double,

Something happened last night.

To their chimney a gray bird came,

Mr. Stork is his name.

In the mean time –

In between time –

Ain’t we got fun?

“It’s not just the front rooms,” Castle told McCall, feeling panic sidle up to his voice. He’d grabbed a phone on the ground line, in case there was something about the cellular phones that made them more … vulnerable. “It’s every window in the house. Every window is a mirror now.”

“All right,” McCall said. “Stay calm. I don’t see anything like that on the monitors, Castle. Why don’t you go upstairs –”

“I am upstairs.”

McCall paused before answering, and Castle could hear him typing. “I’m looking at you sitting in the living room.” Another pause. “You’re not holding a phone, though … do you have me on speaker?”

“I’m telling you, I’m on the third floor. I came upstairs to check the last of the windows so I wouldn’t look like an idiot if you came by and said, hey, look, it’s a regular window. I’m not in the living room, and I don’t have you on speaker phone. The monitors are wrong.”

“Let me talk to Katrine.”

“She’s not — she’s downstairs. Hang on, she’s in the downbelow, it’s gonna take me a bit.”

“I’m showing her sitting on your lap in the living room. You’re telling me she’s not with you?”

Castle grunted, jogging down the stairs. “Christ’s sake, for the last time, I’m telling you I’m not in the living room. All right? The monitors are fucked.”

“Goddamn. Do you have your remote with you? Hit the green button.” Castle did, and waited, and McCall asked, “Third floor stairs halfway down, on the reflection side?”

“That’s me.”

“I’m still seeing you in the living room.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. A loop, a delay?”

“Maybe. Okay. I’m coming over.”

“You’re coming over?”

“Forty-five minutes, an hour tops. Stay out of the downbelow and keep Katrine with you.”

#

Katrine wasn’t in the downbelow. He couldn’t find her anywhere, but the sheets in the middle-floor bedroom still smelled like her, and for a moment he could almost believe they still held her warmth. Her shoes weren’t on the floor anymore — she’d taken them with her when she left.

Left for where?

The letters she’d been rifling through were still on the bed, along with the book where he’d first discovered Michael and Mia’s epistolary adventures, which she’d left open. He frowned as he glanced down at it, and then picked it up. The entry it was open to — he remembered it — was the same as the letter she’d left next to the book.

Goofo,

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the black and wonder if you still look the way you remember? In the dark there are no mirrors, only cold glass. You can picture yourself only clothed in the words others have used to describe you, and for a woman, this is a terrible thing: in my mind, I give myself kind cruel wet sad gleeful eyes, and a dark sensual child’s mouth, the hair of unruly angels, and smooth petal skin as warm as stone. Those are the moments when I feel the heat boiling up in me, and I cannot help it, I often try to make myself cry but soft, and when I fail, that is when I call out for you.

I am very sorry. Please do not be cross.

Only, you must come to me, and tell me what I’m like. You must remind me of myself, Michael, you must bring me myself, please, I beg of you. I ask so little of you, and I know, you have given me Domino, I should be grateful for it, but please oh please, I have given you so much, so much my lord, so much.

your always,

your

Mia.

The handwriting was different: that of the book was the same throughout, albeit sometimes more rushed than others, or more careful. The handwriting in the letter –

He picked up a handful of letters by Mia that he’d read before, and a couple he hadn’t. They were written in the same old-fashioned, loopy script as the Goofo letter — distinctly different, in a dozen or more ways he could see when he held them side-by-side, from the handwriting in the book. The lower-case f’s weren’t remotely similar — he wasn’t sure he’d recognize the letters’ f as what it was, out of context — and the upper-case D’s, and all of the lower-case letters that dipped below the line, like q, g, p, and so on. That was aside from spacing, slant, all those other things he supposed handwriting analysts learned to talk about, where he could only nod at them and say “they aren’t the same.”

Someone had copied the letters into the book. Someone other than Mia. He didn’t know why he trusted that the letter-writer was Mia and the book-writer was not — it could have gone the other way around. He couldn’t quite say that it made more sense for the book to be the copy, because he had no sense to put to it. But it felt more right.

He made a slow circuit of the downbelow, noting without emotion the immaculate cleanliness of Mia’s bedroom after Jonathan’s hired crew vacuumed away the remains of Lamont Pasmore, leaving only the very faint tingle of industrial cleaning agents; and the hair ribbon on the kitchen table that Diana must have lost or left behind as a token. The kitchen still smelled like sex and sweat, and that hyperreality hit him again, the sheer fact that he had fucked a pop star in his kitchen, hard enough for her to sweat.

It wasn’t that she was famous — he’d had sex with about as many famous women as nonfamous ones, although fame was an elastic and twisty thing that was hard to quantify in objective terms, and some of them were only famous because he’d fucked them. But even so: fame itself, in a void, without context, didn’t turn him on. Power had done it for him, and the secret knowledge that a girl famous for her virginity didn’t possess it: that she’d marry some backup dancer in Vegas, and he’d wonder just who had had her first.

His attraction to the idea of fucking her, to the fact that he had fucked her, was more solid than his memory of doing so, which stayed hazy — vivid in smells and the feel of skin, the curve of her ass against his thighs — but slippery almost to the point of hypotheticality when it came to how he’d felt and what he’d been thinking.

Mia’s bedroom reminded him that the voice on the phone had mentioned the other priests, the ones who’d gone back to Rome with Pasmore. Except Pasmore hadn’t gone back. The voice had said they were dead.

He stopped in front of Mia’s room after checking the rest of the downbelow, and dialed Cardinal Romaglio’s cell phone number, waiting through the long strange pause of international cellular calls. “Yes,” Romaglio finally said on the other end, sounding haggard, and Castle realized he wasn’t entirely certain what time it was either in Massachusetts or Rome, but it was probably late.

“Rommy, it’s Castle,” he said. “There have been — some developments. Can you talk?”

“Castle!” Rommy said. “I should say there have been. None of my party returned to Rome.”

Castle’s heart sank. “I knew Pasmore hadn’t.” He explained that quickly, and rushed to bring up the phone call telling him the other three were dead as well.

“I have a message from Jonathan,” Rommy admitted, “he said it was urgent, but he always does, and Rome has been busy for me since I returned. Baroni is the sort of Cardinal whose absence is immediately noted: he keeps as politically active as an exorcist can expect to, and although he will never be Pope nor at the right hand of one, he sees himself as the sort to whom those in power should come for advice. Enough know that he came with me to America that I am besieged by priests and Cardinals wanting to know his whereabouts. And now you tell me he too is dead?”

That ‘he too’ didn’t ring right. “You almost sound like you knew Pasmore was dead.”

“No …” Rommy sounded confused, sounded old. “He had trouble, yes? In the basement? A breakdown.”

“That’s what we remembered, yeah, but Katrine and I couldn’t remember the specifics — or what had happened the rest of the night. Hang on — doorbell. McCall’s here to see what’s what.” He explained, as he headed up the stairs from the downbelow, about the rest of the phone call, and the mirrors where the windows had been. He left Diana out of it, feeling less and less connected to that game, that dalliance.

“Castle,” Romaglio said, “You need to get out of that house. Do you truly believe Jonathan would have you killed if you triggered the alarm?”

“For all I know that’s all it would take for me to die right there, poison capsule or something.” But that was only if the light were red, of course. It had been green. Green for go. Green meant safe, and that the alarms were off.

It was still green when he got to the foyer. “Rommy, sit tight a minute, McCall might want to talk to you. Okay?”

“Yes. But not too long, Castle — it’s late, and I will need to rise early in the morning if I wish to avoid my interrogators.”

Castle opened the door, and McCall walked in, immediately looking frustrated as he peered at the windows.

“See?” Castle said. “Like I said, they’re all mirrors.”

McCall walked by him into the living room, looking at those carefully, and then turned to his side. “Yeah, it looks fine now,” he said, “you’re sure you didn’t just catch your reflection or something?”

Castle frowned. McCall was facing away from him. “It doesn’t fucking look fine, it looks like a mirror. Look at it, I can see myself as clear as –” He stopped. He could see himself just fine. What he couldn’t see was McCall. McCall didn’t show up in any of the mirrors.

Castle waved his hand back and forth behind McCall’s back, watching his reflection wave back at him from the mirror. His reflection looked pale, washed-out, hungover, which he supposed was how he felt. McCall kept up his conversation that Castle wasn’t having, responding to things he wasn’t saying, as though he were on a phone call Castle couldn’t hear the other side of.

Who the fuck was he talking to?

“Castle?”

Castle jumped, and then realized it was Romaglio on the phone. “Jesus, Rommy. Sorry, I spaced for a minute. Uh, listen — McCall’s here, but he’s, um, ignoring me.” When Romaglio didn’t say anything, Castle continued, “I mean, he’s holding a conversation and all, but he’s not responding to things I’m saying, and he’s acting as though I’m saying completely different things.”

“That sounds like a communication problem, but –”

“Okay, let me point out, too, that he doesn’t show up in the mirrors. And that he said they aren’t mirrors, they’re just windows.” Castle stood right in McCall’s path to see if the guy would bump into him, notice him, but McCall veered around him at the last minute without seeming to realize he’d done so.

“Is Katrine still there?” Romaglio sounded more alert now, sharper.

Castle shook his head. “No. Maybe. I don’t — she was here, when I was on the phone with Ricky. I called McCall as soon as the windows went fucked up, and when I went back downstairs, she was gone. I didn’t hear the door or anything, but — I guess she left …”

“Downstairs where? Did you check the garden room?”

Castle started. He hadn’t, in fact. “Hang on. I’m going to check it now.” He left McCall behind him, continuing his conversation with the imaginary, and added, “She was in the downbelow, down in one of the bedrooms there.”

“For heaven’s sake, Castle, why?”

“Uh, we just — were. It’s — we’ve been sort of hanging out down there. We were going through the letters. McCall’s secretary, he won’t even show up here and collate since McCall warned him about Pasmore. Not that I blame him, but –”

“Yes,” Romaglio said, “and given what happened to Lamont, what possesses you to visit that place?”

“Fucking Christ, it’s not like we were in Mia’s room!”

“Watch your mouth, and that’s not the point. I wonder about the –”

“What?”

Romaglio sighed on the other end of the phone, a sigh that came through so crystal clear that Castle could almost swear he felt the air from it. “I wonder about the state of your mind, my boy. The effects of isolation are not to be underestimated. They warn us of them on religious retreats — especially the most social of the clergy, who are more accustomed to the hustle and bustle.”

“Christ’s sake, I’m not some shallow socialite going crazy because I’m cocktail-party-deprived.”

“I know you have a psychiatrist, Castle — when I speak to Jonathan, I’m going to suggest that he come by for a house call.”

Castle threw open the door to the garden room. “Can we stop overlooking the fact that I’m currently wandering around our house without McCall being able to see me, and that the windows have all turned into mirrors? Katrine isn’t in the garden, by the way.”

“You’re there now?”

“I’m there now.” He blinked as he realized that a good deal of the ground had been dug up from below — as though by groundhogs, or beavers, or weasels, or whatever it was that did that kind of thing. Scorpions in the stovetops.

“Whose house, by the way?”

“What?”

“You said ‘our house.’”

“I meant my house.”

“You’re really worrying me.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that. Look. Romaglio. Talking to you right now, I think it’s what’s keeping me from panicking. Okay? I’m in the garden room, and it’s all dug to hell. I mean, like by wolverines, or –”

“Wolverines?”

“Whatever. Squirrels? I don’t know from animals. We had people for that. But there are these holes coming up from the ground, and the garden is halfway fucked to Hanover, is my point.” He paused, listening to the Boston in his voice. The Finches tended to have their own accent, from being raised here there and everywhere — but when you rubbed one hard enough, you found Boston Irish, and once in a very great while Castle got rubbed hahhda nuff. “I’m saying, if I were nuts, would I panic over crazy shit? I don’t think I would. I’d be breathing in the crazy. Fish don’t worry about drowning, right?” Romaglio didn’t say anything, and Castle kicked dirt away from the mess that had been made of the ground. “What I’m looking at, it’s like a tunnel, almost. There’s boards down below this a little ways. It looks like there was a, whatcha call, a passageway up from the downbelow into the garden. I’m guessing Katrine came up that way — God knows why.” The Boston again. Why came out sounding almost like whoy. “She had to push a lot of dirt up and everything, but –” He pushed his foot down into the hole. “Yeah, it’s a concrete tunnel thing, like the top of a submarine or something. Another way out of the downbelow.”

“Castle, what did we do to poor Piero?”

“What?”

“And Philip. I — why was I the one to leave? Why was I the one to go?” Romaglio’s voice broke on every third or fourth word. “My God, Castle, what did we do to them?”

Castle left the garden room and looked to see where McCall had gotten to, finding him in the nursery on the second floor. He was talking to thin air again, but something about his — was it his expression? his tone of voice? no, it was where his eyes were pointed, the fact that his head was tilted down — made Castle think he was talking to Katrine now. Or to the imaginary Katrine. Or to the Katrine Castle couldn’t see. Or — whatever.

“We didn’t do anything, Rommy,” Castle said, and he realized he’d been gradually raising his voice, the way you do when you’re on a cell phone outside and ambient noise breathes out of a thousand invisible mouths: wind in trees, traffic that’s bled into the horizon, animals you’d never curl up next to on an afghan, conversations that’ve diffused into nothing but beebuzz. Maybe being in the garden had made him do it, but realizing it didn’t make him stop. He covered an ear with his hand, his voice at that height where everything came out in the same tone, everything came out half-shouted — Jonathan had drilled into him, again and again, how to project your voice without doing that, but it was an instinct you shook consciously if at all. “It wasn’t us! I don’t know — it was the house — or Mia, or Michael — it wasn’t us!”

“Come, there’s no use in crying!” said the voice on the phone through a gauzy crackle like a pretzel bag, and it wasn’t Romaglio anymore, but it wasn’t Michael either. “‘Come, there’s no use in crying!’ said Alice to herself rather sharply. ‘I advise you to leave off this minute!’ (She generally gave herself very good advice, and sometimes scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes, and once she remembered boxing her own ears for having been unkind to herself in a game of croquet she was playing with herself, for this very curious child — this very curious child — was quite fond of pretending to be two people.) ‘But it’s no use now,’ thought poor Alice, ‘to pretend to be two people. Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!’”

“Who the fuck is this?” Castle asked. “Is this Mia now?”

“I’m Button Bri-ight, I’m Button Bri-ight,” she sang. “I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t really caa-are.”

He started to say something else, and the phone just sizzled at him like frying pork fat, spitting and hissing, and he dropped it, because for just a second he was sure it was going to burn him. He let it stay there, still hissing audibly, and stormed into one of the bedrooms, where he had another cell, and dialed Rommy’s number from that.

Two rings and then, “Castle? Did your phone die?”

“Yeah, not exactly. Phantom phone call intruded.” He grabbed a third cell from the drawer and headed downstairs after McCall’s footsteps. “Listen, please, call Jonathan? Tell him what you remember. Tell him I didn’t kill Pasmore. He’s never going to consider letting me out of here otherwise, unless it’s to be sent to some ’sanitarium’ where I’ll be zonked out on whatever’s fashionable for the next thirty years.”

There was a long enough pause that Castle thought the house had cut him off again.

“Romaglio?”

“I’m sorry, Castle, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“What are you talking about? You’re the one’s been saying you thought you could put a good word in for me –”

“Castle — my boy — I’ll certainly speak to Jonathan, but I won’t lie to him. I saw you kill Lamont. You know I did. It’s been all I can think about. I still see his face, every time I close my eyes — every time I –”

Castle hung up the phone just as McCall left the house, and the light over the door still blazed emerald.

#

“My name is Andrea Bethany Jenkins,” the old woman said, “and I was born in Moltonborough, New Hampshire, on November 15, 1921.” Her accent was definitely present, but it was the woodsier Down East accent of northern New England, without the harsh nasality of an actual Boston accent — and even that was muted, as though it had crawled in late in life. She continued talking to McCall as Castle — unseen still — listened. “I was wetnurse to young Master Michael for a li’l over a year, I’d reckon.”

She nodded along to something someone Castle couldn’t see had said — the invisible other Castle, maybe, or the other Katrine. He hated thinking of them that way, but there was no getting around the fact that people who couldn’t see him were interacting with people he in turn couldn’t see. He sighed, and while listening to McCall’s methodic interrogation of both her and Charlie Hollis, the gatehouse guard from 1955 to 1975 when Michael died, he tried calling various people on his three cell phones and the ground line.

Once in awhile he got through, but usually only briefly, and more and more frequently people seemed to be responding to things he wasn’t saying. It felt paranoid to think of it that way: like he was falling prey to some dissociative disorder, unable to properly gauge the correct response to things. He even tried talking to Doc Williams about it, but Williams only promised to messenger over a fresh bottle of sleeping pills, which didn’t seem a reasonable solution any way you sliced it.

Most of the calls failed without incident. Some of them yielded singing, or buzzing that sounded like a cross between tuneless humming and a hornet’s nest.

He was less and less sure that his reflection was a reflection.

He thought very carefully — the way you do when you’re drunk, or it’s the middle of the night and you’re suddenly awake and need to remember why — about the green light, and why it was that he wasn’t leaving the house. He had weighed the options. On the one hand, he knew what was in the house. He knew every room, every piece of furniture, knew it in the dark, knew it by smell. He hadn’t followed the hole in the garden, but he had shined a Maglite down far enough to see that it led into Mia’s bedroom, and he could connect that to his mental map of the house and its downbelow.

Outside, he didn’t know anymore. The house was like a skin he’d had grafted to him, and he wasn’t sure it was safe to break it.

But more than that: he wasn’t sure the light was real. He knew there had been a light there, indicating the alarm status for the system which didn’t prevent people from coming in — there was a separate system for that which he rarely bothered with — but prevented him from leaving. He didn’t know what it did — whether it notified Jonathan or his people, or activated something they may have put in him when he underwent surgery. But he knew that when the alarm turned on, the light was red.

Before the system was activated, the light wasn’t on at all. At no point had he seen it turn green, until the strangeness of today.

So maybe the house was tricking him. Maybe it wanted him to try to leave through that door. Maybe it knew what would happen — or wanted to find out.

Every time he saw the green light, he thought greenlightgo, and had to stop himself again, working through this, coming once more to the realization that there was no reason to think the green light made him safe, unless he could talk to someone on the outside who told him so.

He went through this several times as he listened to Andrea and Charlie talk about the Van Der Lindens and how nervous Samantha had been after Michael’s birth, and how she’d fretted over him but barely spoke to her daughter Clarissa, who was twenty-one by then and about to graduate from Radcliffe. Charlie remembered Michael as a quiet, bookish boy — not the sort who was easily bullied, but the intense, determined kind, one who — Charlie said — had the women lined up by the time he was a teenager. Andrea made a show of scoffing at the idea of the boy she’d nursed becoming anything other than the light of the world, and then something cut her ears off.

Red lines slashed down the sides of her neck as her ears fell to the ground, and Charlie jumped up, shaking and smelling like he’d pissed his pants, and then his throat filled up with a gurgle, and he sank to his knees, clutching it, turning purple.

“Castle!” McCall shouted, facing a place he wasn’t. “Castle, fight it! Fight the house!”

McCall held up his arms in front of his face and screamed when something fell across them hard enough to shear a strip off, a striation of skin and muscle briefly and vividly clear above the white flash of bone before blood clouded it over.

Everyone but Castle was screaming, and after a moment he wasn’t sure if he was or not. They were being attacked from two sides, as Andrea’s clothes were torn off and McCall’s face fell open in mid-shout, jaw broken with a snap like a drumstick twist, upper lip peeled away like the foil liner of a coffee can, leaving a meaty stub for his nose amidst planes of red, and a long flap of skin dangling ridiculously from his forehead.

Castle stood perfectly still for a moment, breathing hard and raspily, his peripheral vision sending him a thousand fight-or-flight signals as movement filled the reflections in the mirrored windows — a dozen Castles cast on silver and light were grabbing the air, tearing at it, snarling, in all the places where McCall and the servants would have been if their reflections showed up.

The screaming grew wet as Castle grabbed first McCall and then Charlie, trying unsuccessfully to pull them away from their attackers, and Andrea writhed on the ground as hard, cruel bruises like handprints appeared on her varicosed legs. Charlie coughed once, a hard, dry cough that sounded as though he’d been trying to get it out the whole time, and then something ground his face into the hardwood floor until his jaw snapped with a force hard enough to scatter his teeth clattering across the floor. They sounded like pearls poured onto a marble countertop.

It became unspeakable.

“So you’re really a virgin?” Katrine asked, sitting on the counter and leaning forward, with her head on her hand and her elbow on her knee like the Thinker.

“Yeah,” Diana said, unzipping her $700 salmon satin-weave velour miniskirt and folding it up carefully before putting it down on the downbelow’s kitchen table. Castle leaned against the wall, arms folded, watching her undress and ticking off her wardrobe in imaginary pop-ups. Where the skirt had been, she was left wearing a low-rise cotton thong that cost $80 because the color, Vanilla Peach, was licensed from a Japanese fashion boutique that trafficked in nothing but clothing concepts and proprietary shades. Her T-shirt looked like a standard-issue Joy Division T-shirt circa 1987, tricked out with some gold thread and surgical tears that gave him occasional flashes of pale orange bra strap against the spray-on tan of her skin. Up close, she looked less plastic than on television, and had aged in that way that was always startling, like a year wasn’t so much a unit of time as it was a remix: Castle hadn’t seen her in person since he and Rachael met her backstage at one of her concerts, when her star was still rising, somewhere several steps beyond Tiffany but still a far cry from Mariah. “Haven’t you listened to my music?”

Katrine shook her head and shrugged. “I always get you confused with Mandy Moore.”

“She’s the blonde-turned-brunette, I’m the blonde-turned-redhead.” That’s what it was that looked so different about her: her Marilyn blonde hair had gone Tori red, and something like glitter had been sprayed lightly on her cheeks and upper arms — and thighs, Castle saw, inspecting them from across the room — as mock freckles.

“Okay,” Katrine said, continuing the game of place-the-celebrity, “Did you do that video with the snake?”

“Which snake?”

“The giant white snake? That you were like dancing with? It was draped around your shoulders, like a fur stole. There was this pyramid, and a disco floor with the squares that change colors.”

“Oh motherfuck, no, that Vegas shit is trashy. I did the video where the black snake slithered around my thighs while I was sitting on the broken toilet. You know, ‘Let Yourself Happen’? With the big bonsai tree growing out of the back of the toilet tank, you know? And the color was all washed out?” She grabbed one of the old wooden chairs from the table and sat on it, crooking her legs and leaning backwards, her expression going suddenly near-vacant, hollow, her posture carefully awkward. “I was all like that? I had a pink teddy on, and this sort of Dirrty eye makeup, David Fincher directed the video.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I saw that one.”

“I did,” Castle said, and Diana turned around in the chair like she’d just remembered he was there. “It was too Fiona Apple for you. I was afraid you were going to get too skinny, all ribs and sincerity.”

“Fuck that,” she said, “I can’t risk my tits. Every time I wear something low-cut on a magazine cover, I sell an extra fifty thousand units.”

“Speaking of which.”

“Yeah,” Katrine said, “let’s see the rack. That’s what caught my eye when your video came on, and when Castle said you were a virgin –”

“Yeah,” Diana said. “I know, I rock the virgin whore. That gets people so hot. Which video was it?”

“The Peter Pan one where you did that whole choreographed dance thing wearing the playing cards?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I hated that outfit, but it came out pretty nice, with the Lost Boys and the part where I’m Tinkerbell and all.”

“Playing cards are Alice in Wonderland, though,” Castle said. “Katrine, would you take her shirt off?”

“Damn straight,” Katrine said, and Diana’s eyes widened a little when Katrine hopped off the counter and tugged the Joy Division shirt up. The pop star took it off the rest of the way, and then came into her own altogether, smiling first at Katrine and then at Castle as she reached behind her, her shoulders and the exposed tops of her breasts dotted with those fake glittering freckles as she unhooked her bra and slid it down. Her breasts looked younger than she did, or maybe that was Castle’s memory playing tricks with him. But even though he knew she’d just turned nineteen, he would have sworn the tits belonged to a sixteen year old, soft and pleasantly awkward, “pretty” more than “hot,” tits you could more easily imagine fondling under a sweater or sucking through a swimsuit than coming on.

But at the same time, there was something majestic about them, something mystical and amazing. They were –

“Shit,” Katrine said. “They look — famous.”

That was it. It was like he’d known the shape of them so well from two platinum albums, dozens of magazine covers, and God knows how many billboards, that rouged cleavage pouting at him from so many places for the last four years, that he had developed some internal sense of what they’d look like bare: and seeing them now, not in some movie where lighting plumped them up and a puffer kept the nipples erect despite the heat of the studio lights, or in an airbrushed pictorial, actually seeing them in the flesh, with the marks along the underside where the wire of the bra had pressed, and the way her nipples were soft and somehow plump, pink and somehow lip-like — seeing them like that, it was more real, it was hyper-real, and despite his nigh-immunity to starstruckness he was hit by the sudden and extremely erotic awareness of just how motherfucking famous these tits were. One of the two or three most famous pairs of never-seen-naked tits on the planet.

“Not bad,” he rasped, his throat dry, and he hated, really hated, the satisfied look Diana had. She ran her hands over them, less smugly than she did in her videos when they were clothed and painted, more like she was just waking up her skin, letting the slightly cool air of the downbelow prick it. “We still have a deal?”

The girl looked nervous for a minute. “Just you, right? I mean, if Katrine wants to make out with us, that’s totally cool, she’s hot. I made out with Pink a couple times. But dildos and things like that, strap-ons, that’s not for me. And if you want to do my ass, tell me first for Christ’s sake, don’t play the ‘oh, it was an accident’ card.”

“I don’t need your ass,” he said, and she actually looked hurt. “Either way, it’s just me. Katrine’s just going to watch while I fuck you. If you bleed, if you’re really a virgin, you get the whole million. Otherwise it’s just halfsies.”

“Yeah,” Diana said. “Okay. And again, the big thing here is, this never leaves. I mean, no photos, nothing. I don’t need to deal with a sex tape situation.”

“Not a problem,” Castle said, and unbuttoned his jeans as Diana got off the chair and started to kneel in front of him. “What’re you doing?”

“Don’t you want me to suck it first? I’ve had a lot of practice.”

He snorted. “Get the fuck up. I didn’t rent your mouth, I rented your pussy.” I bought your blood.

What struck him wasn’t the hurt look on her face, but how much he enjoyed it and how expertly she melted it. How many times had she taken verbal abuse — maybe more for all he knew — from managers, agents, producers, no-name little record company doodads? If he hadn’t been looking at her, he never would have seen that mixture of shock and pain hit her before neutral perkiness replaced it. He hoped Katrine had caught the look too: maybe she’d see his point, that there were so many ways to have fun with people without having to kill them, ways they’d be grateful for, ways that could even help them. The money Diana would get today would be under the table, cash, money agents and managers and lovers and parents couldn’t touch. If she was smart, it would still be there when her tits remembered her gravity and her buying public decided a 25 year old pop star was six years too old to be interesting.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Right here? Do you want to go in the living room, or — a bedroom, or –”

“Here’s good.” He and Katrine had watched the closed-circuit monitors for awhile, and most of the downbelow’s kitchen was off-camera. It might have been miked, but nothing would show up on film. “Just bend over the table.”

Katrine walked over to her and stroked the back of her neck before pushing her head down towards the table’s surface. Diana’s arms shot out in a protective stance, and there she was, bent over, the thong dividing her ass into two halves that were somehow more appealing than her tits or the prospect of her virginity. It was an ass that hadn’t had implants and wasn’t sculpted to look like it had — an ass she hadn’t made a career out of, and probably couldn’t have. But it was a good ass. The creases in her skin where ass met legs were like eyelashes, and the fact that she didn’t have the smooth, featureless tone of a good porn star brought that reality home again. She had the ass of a girl who was still young enough to get away with eating too much pizza, a girl who shook her tits with a troupe of backup dancers behind her, and had spent too long on her feet at one photo shoot after another.

This was the kind of ass they brought in when they wanted an ass double in a movie. It was a believable ass, a vivid ass.

Diana stood rigid, but didn’t seem nervous as he pushed the thong down and had her step out of it, reaching between her legs to play with her ass first, and then her pussy, finding her just barely wet. He gave her ass a slap and unbuttoned his jeans, pushing himself against her, but he wasn’t hard enough yet, and smacked her ass again, hard enough that she yipped in surprise.

“Virgins are such fucking trouble,” he said, starting to get pissed, and grabbed her ass, kneading it roughly, digging his nails in. “Katrine, why don’t you suck her tits, get her ready.”

“You got it,” Katrine said, and started to bend over the table, but stopped, pulling a chair up and sitting down instead. “Grab my chair, Diana,” she said. “Bend over this way instead. He can watch me suck your tits while he fucks you.”

Diana nodded, and Castle watched the reflection of her face pass across Katrine’s eyes as the call girl grabbed the pop star’s breast and pulled the nipple a few times, dragging it down with her thumb before pressing her face into the flesh and sucking. Katrine wasn’t putting on a show, and Castle could barely see what she was doing as parts of her face dis- and reappeared.

“How do you like her?” he asked, still toying with Diana, feeling that platinum album skin and the small, obstinate bumps where her glued-on freckles were. He reached around, squeezing the girl’s breast and pushing it harder against Katrine’s mouth.

“Mmm,” was all Katrine offered in response, and Diana gasped a small, dainty, practiced gasp that became a squirrelish moan when Kat’s teeth bit down. The moan got cut off when Katrine kissed her, sloppily, hungrily, and catching Katrine’s eye was all Castle needed to get hard. There was a stark, naked, raw hunger in those eyes, and something in him resonated with it with whip-crack suddenness.

He pushed Diana’s hips forward and down a little and shoved himself into her. She was as tight as he could have imagined, and she groaned into Katrine’s mouth as he fucked her quickly and coldly. What was turning him on wasn’t the pop star on his cock — it was the power, and he knew it. The fact that he’d bought this and could buy more. The fact that he could turn his will into a magnet, and draw what he wanted to hand.

He grunted as he fucked her with fast, jerking thrusts, rubbing her ass against him, making sure to plunge in as far and as deep as he could, and when he pulled out after he came, his cock was wet but there wasn’t any blood. Katrine giggled at the sight, and the high-pitched, strained sound of her was like a familiarly-scented breeze.

“Virgin popstar, huh Diana?” he asked.

Diana looked at him over her shoulder, and moved in a way he guessed would have been a shrug in some other position. “Sometimes — sometimes there’s no blood, you know, your first time? And — maybe you didn’t try hard enough. Maybe you didn’t get it in — OHH!”

Katrine had bitten down on her breast, a few inches north of nipple, hard enough for there to still be blood on her teeth when she pulled away.

“Well there you go,” Castle said, pulling his jeans back up and reaching into his pocket for the wad of ridiculously large-denominated bills. “The full million if you bleed. Go clean yourself up.”

Diana made a noise like she was stifling something, and waddled ginger-footed to the bathroom without bothering to grab her clothes. Castle saw the look on Katrine’s face as she watched the girl leave, and grabbed her, pushing her down on the kitchen table and fucking her right there, fast and hard, both of them hissing, a hand bunching up the girl’s miniskirt, flecks of blood on both their mouths.

#

Samantha,

As I write this, I have been away from Domino only one night, but I miss my home and my love already. I suppose by the time the letter reaches you I shall have been gone three days: so treble the sentiments here expressed, accordingly. It strikes me, though — this, our first significant time apart since the fortnight you spent with your mother when Clarissa was born — as an excellent time for our relationship to mature, and to refine our live in each other’s absence. I am reminded of the many aged couples I have encountered, as I’m sure you have as well: the ones who have grown comfortable with each other, like lip readers.

I hope, then, that you take this instruction as all that it is: the advice, the direction, of a man who loves you well, who hopes to love you until we both are in our ancient years, and who is himself some handful of years older than you.

First, you should wear your hair differently. I have enclosed, as illustration, a photograph of my late sister when she was your age, shortly before she passed on. Mia was ever clever when it came to feminine matters of the head: hairstyles, hats, other such adornments, all these things were her tools. You have not, I think, the proper face for a hat except on those occasions when one is necessitated for practical concerns. But your hair could do with some seeing to.

I would like you to adjust your habits where cosmetics are concerned, and again I refer you to the photograph. Take special note of the way the cheekbones are accentuated, the eyes made brighter and more clever-looking, instead of dull and washed-off as yours sometimes do at the end of a weary day. You are a beautiful woman whose beauty need not leave you because of clumsy handling.

I have sent under separate cover a writ to hire a seamstress to adjust several dresses for you which I believe would suit your coloration and frame. The dresses in question are in the third floor wardrobe room, in the north closet, portioned aside from the others.

This concludes my remarks concerning the adjustment of your appearance.

As to your comportment. When we met you were a fine young woman, and “young” was an emphasized word in that phrase. You are certainly not old, and should something befall me, you would still be of reasonably marriageable age without being unfairly marked as “a widow.” But nevertheless, you are also a mother long-recovered from childbirth. You are young but uninnocent, in no way which scandals you.

It behooves you to act accordingly, do you not think so? As children, when first we become aware of sex, we imagine the day when we handle it with confidence — and by the same token, we somehow assume that those elders we actually know (to wit, our parents, aunts, uncles, and those other folk who are a full generation ahead of us) have put sex behind them, as we have ourselves put the things of our young childhoods aside.

What do we imagine of that intervening time? Of that sexual envelope, bound by fear and inexperience on one side and wrinkled disinterest on the other?

Confidence. Delight without excess. Free access. Frank discussion. Masterful skill.

My darling, we are in that envelope. Whatever occurs to us when we become those “old folk” who seemed so untouchably distant when we were very young, we are not only adults now in name and license, but in experience. You have raised a fine daughter for me. You have been a fine wife. But we have had no more children, and I know this upsets you, as you know I am not untouched by it.

Perhaps we must adjust our bedtime behavior, then. I wish you to speak more frankly about how you feel when we are having sex. I wish — though you may think this counter-productive — to explore sex more beyond its procreative process. There is a wild, untamed thing within you, and I think you fear being shamed by it. Do not be, my dear. Unleash it. Revel in it. Be proud of your heart and your desires.

I have a good deal of business to attend to, Samantha, and much of it will distract me, perhaps trouble me, which is why I write you now: this all, I think, is ample food for thought in the coming months. Perhaps it will come to pass that we will have another child, or two, or three — perhaps we will even leave Domino for some country home as you used to talk of, or return to Alabama.

Call me superstitious, dear, but please dispose of this letter after you have read it.

Your loving husband,

Michael

#

“I would so fuck Michael,” Katrine said, curling up on the bed and giggling a little as she read to Castle from one of the boxes of letters.

“Yeah?” he asked, thinking that from the photographs he’d seen, he’d be more than happy to fuck Mia. Not despite the fact that she was crazy but because of it, at least in part. Chicks like that could be amazing in bed. Sometimes they were terrible: all neurosis and hang-ups, or micromanagers. But he was pretty sure that hadn’t been the case with Mia.

“Oh yeah. A guy like that, who’s so — definite? So strong? Fuck yes. I like the bad boy thing. I can almost picture the way his eyes would look as he told me to — I don’t know — to use a different fork or something. Kind of like your eyes are looking now.”

He held up a finger. “Shh. The hold music just stopped, I think –”

“Hi Castle,” Ricky Tremaine said on the other end. “Sorry for the wait, I’d gone downstairs to Au Bon Pain.”

“No problem,” Castle said, and for a moment the mention of that faux upscale mall mainstay made him ache. He used to get their tomato soup — he couldn’t remember when, but he remembered the smell of it, like the fast-food version — in a good way, somehow — of the slow-roasted tomato soups he’d get in the North End. And there was this carrot cake muffin or something, that was surprisingly good.

“Anyway, thanks for returning my call. I’ve got some info for you — I faxed you a bunch of it, and I think McCall gave you the gist of that.”

“Yeah, about the Van Der Lindens?” Castle asked. Katrine was curled up like a cat on the bed, watching him, and it distracted him too much to listen — he waved a hand at her and wandered into the hallway and back upstairs to the kitchen.

“Right, the basics. I’ve got some more on that, and on Copland, the guy who built Domino. Where you want me to start?”

“At the beginning. Start with Domino.”

“All right, Copland was a small-time hustler — Florida land scams, the wallet trick, real basic Sting type stuff — who hit it big when Prohibition came and he lucked into a few Canadian connections who’d supply him with whiskey if he could unload it fast enough. He had some close calls, but it looks like he managed them — he was the Boston guy for New York Jimmy Gatz, who in turn was one of Capone’s New York guys, all right?”

“Yeah, okay, gangsters.” Castle poured himself a Scotch and grabbed a Twinkie from the open box in the living room, pacing back and forth down the hallway from reflected side to original side.

“Bootleggers first, gangsters by necessity. I don’t think Copland ever got bloody, and New York Jimmy was never tagged with anything worse than aggravated assault over some chick — he died in a hit and run that might’ve been mob-related and sloppy, or just plain sloppy. But Copland, anyway, Copland isn’t Boston’s Big Man, you understand, but he’s still raking in the dough.”

“So he built Domino?”

“Yeah. Guess his wife had this thing, wanted to be part of polite society, what the fuck ever. They’d been living in a brownstone, a nice place, but it was still in the city, so it was shit as far as she was concerned. He’s definitely the one responsible for the initial construction of your special basements there. He had a hidden basement for stashing whiskey, French wine, cash, probably guns. Rumor had it he had more than that, too.”

“What’s that mean?”

“No idea. That’s what I got. That he had some kind of ‘bootlegger’s helper’ stashed in the basement.”

“All right, go on.” The light over the front door still blazed red, small and unobtrusive unless you looked for it, indicating whatever alarm systems, whatever precautions, Jonathan had employed to keep him in the house were still live. And probably always would be. Castle stared at it, glared at it, willing it to blink green-for-go.

“Copland got pinched, his wife put Domino up for sale, he got out on a plea, divorced her, and sold it himself to Van Der Linden, who immediately hired some serious construction crews. Place was held up and cordoned off for months, and the workers were all brought in from out of state.”

“He didn’t want them talking.”

“That’s what it sounds like. The story was that they were repairing structural flaws, but it’s bullshit. You had that forensics engineer in, right?”

“Yeah, he said the basic structure of the downbelow was in place before most of it got around to being built.”

“Exactly. Sounds like Van Der Linden finished what Copland started. First he doubled the size of the house by reflecting it, and then he carved out the rest of the downbelow.”

“All right. All right. Well, listen, what else can you tell me about the Van Der Lindens? I know Mia and the father died in the house fire — what about the mother?”

“Grace Mickelson Van Der Linden. Boston Irish. Not poor, but not exactly rich, either — her mother was the first of her family born in America, and both sides of her family were in law enforcement and civil service. Corrupt, probably.”

“How’d she die?”

“Fell down the stairs. Broke her neck.”

“Sounds suspicious. When and where?”

“Family home. Not long after Michael got married, it looks like. Same week his daughter was born.”

“Huh. Any idea who was in the house with her?”

“Mia was. The usual servants, but they knew better than to say anything. They knew what had happened to the maid’s cousin, and the boy from town. They knew better than to cross Mia, knew no one walked away from fucking with a Van Der Linden.”

Castle frowned and stuffed half of the Twinkie in his mouth, chewing and swallowing before asking, “You’re saying you think Mia killed her mother?” He could imagine it, the way she talked. Getting pissed at Michael for having a baby that wasn’t hers. All that angry energy and no place to put it, and conditioned not to direct it at him, forced to turn her hate for him back into love.

“I’m saying who cares who killed the bitch,” and Ricky’s voice was perfectly calm but no less sneering for its stillness. “Who the fuck cares who killed some needless woman decades ago? Let’s talk about more recent cases, Castle.”

“What’re you talking about, Ricky?”

“Let’s talk about who killed Rachael Abrams and those surrogate bitches. Let’s talk about who killed Lamont Pasmore, Piero Strabo, Philip Ramsey, Giacomo Baroni. Let’s talk about Katrine.”

Castle’s throat went dry. “Who is this?”

“Let’s talk about scorpions in the stovetops, Sebastian. About the worms that crawl out when you lift the mask up. You want to ask me about my mother? About my mother? My mother was a cunt I crawled out of, a cunt who kept twitching long after her purpose was served, like a chicken after slaughter. You want to ask me about my sister? You want to fuck my sister, Sebastian, is that what you want? You want to stick your little cock in her hole and wiggle it around? She’d just laugh at you, toy with you. You’d never be more than a moment’s amusement for Mia. You’d never even get her attention. Mia’s special. Her cunt was always tight, her breasts always firm, her mouth tasted like honey and black coffee.”

Castle pulled the phone away and looked at the display, but everything looked kosher: Ricky Tremaine, the Caller ID readout said, and the seconds kept ticking in the length-of-call tab. “The fuck are you pulling?”

“Castle?” Ricky asked, and his voice sounded cautious now, slightly alarmed. “Are you there?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m here.”

“The connection seemed to drop out for a minute.” But from the tone of Ricky’s voice, Castle didn’t think the connection had dropped at all. “What were we talking about?”

“The circus,” Castle said without thinking, and the voice on the other end — the other end of something — laughed a sharp laugh, like you hear at dinner parties when the men go into another room to smoke cigars and pick presidents. “Who the fuck is this?” The answer got cut off by the sound of something falling, something being dropped — from all over the house. Like when you drop a hardcover book, held flat, onto an uncarpeted floor. “What? What was that?”

“This is the circus,” the voice said, and it didn’t sound a thing like Ricky — it sounded like a Beacon Hill accent, a Boston Brahmin accent, cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and diamond necklaces glittering at luncheon clubs. “This is Domino. This is the downbelow.”

The light fell odd and broken around him, and the small crescent-shaped windows carved into the top of the front door had gone silver like mirrors, showing nothing but his own pale reflection. The windows in the living rooms were the same, and at the end of the hallway. Long picture windows that should have shown bright green grass, a wall of hedges, sunlight — greens and yellows, bits of blue — showed nothing but the furniture, his face, himself, like Domino had folded itself over him.

“Welcome to the circus, Sebastian,” the voice said, and the light over the door turned blindingly emerald green. “You don’t ever have to go home again.”

Dear Rabbit,

Do you remember ere I called you that? Does ere mean that, “when”? I hope I’m using it right. Do you remember when I used to call you Rabbit? You the Rabbit and I your Cheshire and maybe the world was Alice, then, or maybe one of our toys. Maybe them all. Maybe we outgrew Alice, or fell into a dull lump of wishing for her to come. Maybe our Alice will be a grand mansion to which we move, to get away, to crawl away lost and ever.

Sometimes madness is wisdom, dear heart Michael: perhaps when you feel such urgings as arise in you, such lusts as drive you, you ought simply follow them and abandon the shame which pursues them. Perhaps we ought at last simply be governed by ourselves instead of others, do you not think? When you went off to war — oh Michael. Oh Michael when you allowed a piece of paper to move you across the country. Oh Michael.

Is it possible I have become lost without moving a whit? Can space be merely relative — have I moved because you have left, and I occupy a new space now, one without your shape?

I say Fuck the girl as You like, this Samantha, this judge’s daughter. fuck her as often as possible, fuck her well, trample the flower. I say ruin her deeply. ruin her and find she likes it not near so well as I did. If you dislike virgins so much, perhaps it is good that you are so adept at re-ducing their numbers.

I have done as you asked.

my name is button bright my name is button bright my name is BUTTON bright my name is button BRIGHT my name is button bright my name my name is yr,

Cheshire

#

Dear Cheshire,

How quickly you vanish to nothing but a smile, how quickly melt to nothing but satisfaction. What I love about you, dear, is that you are nothing like I was in my younger and more vulnerable years. You are not innocent, but you are untouched in ways I cannot quantify, as unblemished in that quirky mind of yours as along your pale soft skin. It is sometimes — and take this as a compliment upon a uniquely feminine virtue — as though your mind is utterly untouched by the clammy hand of Reason.

I wonder would it pleasure you to know the number of times I engaged with maids, with serving women, with future debutantes, slaking my thirst for you before I finally took you.

I wonder sometimes if I waited too long, and others if I did not wait long enough. It is much like picking a fruit, say a peach or a plum. At any moment, plucking it from its tree is a wager — you may judge its current condition, but even expertise cannot tell you for certain if it is at its peak, with every moment thereafter one of degradation — or if that peak is yet on the horizon, forever unrealized should you consume it. Not only cannot you tell to look at it, but you will never know. A fruit picked, a fruit eaten, is a fruit beyond observation. Once it is interfered with, it cannot resume its natural course.

But one way or the other, the fruit needs to be picked before it drops to rot.

Now, as I have promised you — even, or especially is it?, at those times when you have insisted it is not a favor you require nor will use — I release you and permit you to find pleasure in the company of other men. Mind that I do not mean to the exclusion of our times together: but rather in amplification thereof.

There are stipulations, of course.

I mean you to take these stipulations quite seriously, oh Cheshire.

It is important that you not spoil your appetite. I therefore require that you first of all inform me of the nature of any unusual congress — any quirks of desire you encounter. We both may benefit from such shared explorations, and I think it a good way to learn of the world.

I furthermore discourage you from adopting a too-submissive role with any other man. I do not insist you be the aggressor, either before or after the initial seduction which catalyzes such romps. But do not let your will be too far bent to the desires of men of the world. In this, I look out for you much more than myself. In this, I resume my role as your elder brother first and for most.

Thirdly, I wish for you to retain your youthly proportions and enjoyable fit, and as such I require that you permit access to yourself only by men whose cocks are significantly smaller than my own. I would find it unpleasant to come home to a house left disheveled, as it were, a bed left rumpled with the bedclothes stretched out of their rightful shape. Given the option, choose length over girth. If you find yourself committed to a course of action involving an inappropriately endowed man, you will simply have him in your anus instead, or dispose of him with your mouth or hands. It is convenient that I have made sure you are well-versed in such arts.

Finally, you will sleep with no man who is a business associate of mine or a social acquaintance. I do not wish to hear of your adventures from the other side of the bed, should they not realize your surname.

I do, in fact, advise sex which is anonymous over that which is emotional. I find it has worked well for me, and I think you are masculine enough in spirit that you will find it equally enjoyable.

I will know when you disobey, sweet flower.

Remember too that you are young in the world: men will expect a girl of fourteen to be shy, to be timid. Do try and summon up some semblance of this, or you may addict them.

yr brother, yr love,

Michael.

#

Dear Mike,

Do you know how much I would have hated that diminutive, when I was young? It struck me as far too American, far too modern. But I suppose that is what comes of being born in a previous century. There have been two World Wars since then, and we thought the first would be the end of all such things. There have been two prosperities and a depression since then. It was very long ago. Can you believe I served in the first World War? The Great War? I suppose to you that is nearly impossible to conceive of. It has long since been overshadowed by the war with the Nazis, which is such stuff of films.

The price you pay for having a father who was old when you were born is having to listen to such reminiscing, such wide-eyed looks at this modern age. The benefit, I think, is my long experience in matters of the world. I try very hard not to look down on you, Mike. I hope I succeed, and I invite you to make your complaints known to me when you have them. I try very hard not to treat you as a child, and to remember what it was like to be eighteen.

And so happy birthday, my boy. It is 1959, and you are a man in a world filled with rock and roll, hamburgers, and motorcycles. Such a world as this, such a strange and clever world.

It seems a good time to impart to you my advice concerning the finer flesh, the fairer sex, the matter of women.

I’m not going to embarrass you by repeating the essential facts we discussed years ago, nor by assuming you have no experience. You have dated several girls, and I have no doubt their fathers would have call to be upset with you. But you are a man grown now — you are of the age where your dalliances could become more serious, both emotionally and socially, not to mention financially — or biologically, shall we say.

Do bear with an old man, if I say something which seems obvious? Better to say what is not needed than need what is not said.

Keep your fingernails clean and frequently trimmed, not only for appearance’s sake but practicality. Likewise always have handy a good pair of gloves.

Take no special pride in robbing a woman of her virtue. Indeed, be cautious with virgins — once seduced, they are invariably more trouble than they are worth.

Do not smoke in a woman’s presence, or offer her strong drink other than wine. Do not spit, nor permit words harsher than damn or piss to pass from your lips to her ear.

Do not begrudge a woman for knowing more than you do in some subject or other. You are an intelligent man, intelligent enough that no one of any sex can be smart enough to make you feel dim. Remember, though, that being smart doesn’t make you correct: no more than being correct makes a man smart.

Engage a woman in conversation. Listen to what she says, and if you don’t like it, or don’t like the way she listens, find another woman. There is no beauty in the world whose shine will hide dullness forever.

When sleeping with a woman with no intent of pursuing a relationship outside the bedroom, choose one who is either not very smart or prides herself on being a libertine. Women of less than perfect appearance are often ideal for this, as they may be grateful for any attention you give them. Be cautious of exceptionally beautiful women who prove possible to bed without great effort, or whom you know to have bedded inferior men of low breeding: they want something from you, and if it isn’t money or vows, it is likely some emotional energy to fill a void within them which has caused a neurosis.

Never lie in complimenting a woman. If you can find nothing about her worth complimenting, then there is no motive to lie. The truth has a ring which cannot be forged, though it may under other circumstances be surrogated.

Suffer no abortions if you find your seed has taken root, but do not let yourself be pressured into marriage, either. Make an equitable and honorable arrangement. No woman benefits from marriage to a man who does not wish to be married to her.

When you do eventually have a child — and I think, if you are wise, the first time will be not less than six years from now and not more than ten — advise the doctor to deliver the birth by Caesarian section, for the comfort of your wife and yourself.

Do not speak ill of a woman to her father, and know a woman very well before speaking ill of her father to her — even if she begins the conversation.

If you must keep a mistress, or dally with more than one woman at once, ask yourself if each is giving you something the other or others don’t. If not, make certain that you have not simply fallen victim to habit. If you are spreading yourself among women in order to make it clear to each of them that you are not available for commitment, simply be sure to choose women with unique things to offer you.

Above all, Michael, remain a man. Mind a woman keeps her place. She may, especially in this modern century, express herself in ways which once would have been scandalous or unmannerly, and that is not a shameful thing: a strong woman is a woman you want to keep with you. But however strong she is, she must nevertheless cow to you when it comes down to the wire. The most vicious guard dog on the grounds must still scamper to heel when the master claps.

Love,

your father,

Michael Paul Van Der Linden

#

Dear Rabbit,

How I hate it in the hole. It is too dark down here, too tight, too confining. How I hate you for sending me here. How I hate you for loving me.

But oh I know twas all my own doing, me. Do you, doodly doo? With your Trampmantha, and your fetid little baby girl Clarissa. Oh, I should take them away from you. Oh, I should make you send them away. Keeping me here in your fuckhole. Keeping me here AS your fuckhole. Oh, my beauty bastard, you.

yr

fuck whore

yr love

yr

Cheshire

#

Dear Goofo,

Bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard bastard.

The sky should crack I love you so.

#

Dear Michael,

You have me in such a muss, feeling so — I don’t know, — so — so do-don’t-ish. Don’t you know? When you wake up an hour and a half later than usual because it rained hard all night — thunder for your pillows, sleeping like a soldier — and the storm became a drizzle before dawn and kept the sun from ever quite rising, and the day just went all grey like spent paraffin. Don’t you know? When it’s damp in the house and cool, and everything new smells musty even so. The extra sleep makes you feel all energized, but nevertheless, you don’t feel like going out, you just feel like sitting and kicking your feet back and forth like dancing, or twirling around in a circle until you can’t stand to breathe, or huddling into a ball and gathering all that energy together until you explode, just explode and can’t stop. That’s how I feel, Michael, and it’s you who done it.

I cannot believe you would marry a woman — not even a woman, a girl! younger than I! am I too old for you now, too used, too fucked, too soiled, too fucked, too dirty, tu fucked? — about whom you spoke with such contempt. It has made me most upset. If you would marry her — then how much must you hate me? Surely you love her barrels and bushels more than you do me, and so what things would you say of me that would make your comments on her seem shining compliments and sonnets of love?

You hateful boy, you prideful man, you wanton fuck. You want and fuck.

I’ve half a mind to tell Father. He’d never let you marry that Southern trash tramp slut cunt whore then, if he knew you’d been fucking me, fucking me since I was nine, oh you didn’t call it fucking you said we’d wait, said we’d wait until I was old enough, but it counts when it’s my mouth, Michael. It counts when you’re in my mouth, and when you check my tits every day to see if they’ve grown any, and when your fingers are inside me feeling me, like some experiment, like some curious thing, like some toy you haven’t found the workings of, oh, oh, oh it counts. Do you think Father would look easy and kindly on you, to know you’d waited until I was twelve? That for three years, I only tasted you and never bled for you?

He’d never let you then, never let you do anything, he’d send you to your room is what he’d do, he’d send you away, he’d lock you up, like a boy, not a man. You whore bastard tramp.

You know how I get when I’m so upset as this. You know how I do. Oh wasn’t it you, Michael, wasn’t it you that told me. I couldn’t get angry with you, oh I couldn’t ever. Father would know, you said, if I got angry with you Father would know, I must never show anger to my brother, mustn’t ever no, and so it was the boy I went for that one time, wasn’t it though? The banker’s boy, the one they found drowned in the rain barrel. But I cheated, Michael, just like you do. I made him you before he died. I made him be you, for the length of a tickle and the length of a blade — mmm.

I couldn’t be so careful this time. I just — you made me so upset, so do-don’t-ish, don’t you see? don’t you know? why does no one ever speak of this, of feeling like this, does the whole world walk around in bandages and elastics round their hearts, like a corset for the mind, binding until you cannot but barely breathe but oh ain’t you just a picture. Why are there so many soppy novels about this and that and the other but none about what’s real and true?

Michael my love, my love my love, Michael my love my love. Rabbit, Rabbit, give me your answer do — oh I’m half crazy, just for the love of you.

We had foie gras with dinner tonight, darling. It was lovely. I had mine on toast points with wilted greens and wine jelly and I wished you dead by fire and lightning.

But if I couldn’t be angry with you, it left only me. I think — I think I shall be repaired ere — does it mean that, “ere,” does it mean “before”? — you come back, but if not, you shall find my kisses less sweet. As perhaps you might anyway.

Oh Goofo oh, oh you son of a bitch. What you make me do for you, what I make us do for love.

ever,

always,

nothing,

Mia.

#

Michael, my rescuer,

I so loved our visit while your Dear Dear Wife Saint Samantha Of The Golden Cunt From Which Flows The Honey Divine was away at her cousin’s wedding in That Glorious State Of Flea-Biting Alabama. As always, our time seems to evaporate like soap bubbles, disappearing ere — does it mean that, “ere,” does it mean “as soon as” — we touch it.

I have news! Oh yes. Such auspicious news. It seems while I was in yr company, Father arranged a MARRIAGE for me! Oh, at last I join my brother in the bonds of holy matrimony. Oh, only not like that, dear.

No, not like that.

Don’t be silly.

yr sister, ever-loving, ever-dutiful,

soon to fill another man’s bed,

Mia.

#

Goofo,

Darling I really do think we must do something about YOU KNOW WHO (that is to say FATHER). I am writing this missive rather quickly while he stews in his whiskey, for we are in grave trouble and not least of all danger. He has somehow found our correspondence. I will not dance about but rather put it plainly: he knows first of all that we have been fucking for years, and second that we each of us have killed here and there. I do not know if he has quantities attached to either quelle scandal, but I am sure he will have choice words and perhaps more choice actions.

I take back every threat I ever made against you, every unkind thing. Michael, sweetheart, we must do something. You must do something. You are older, stronger, and a man. Help me.

Yr

Mia

#

Sweet heart,

Mia, my sweet and loving sister, I know your first reaction to my news will be an unpleasant one, and I know it will be because you care for me. But I wanted — needed — to tell you so that you would not hear it directly from Father.

I am to marry Samantha Montgomery. She is a sweet girl, if young. She is also with child. Arrangements are being made even as I write this. This shall be my life now: father and husband. You know, too, that it means I will come into the most substantial portion of my inheritance.

Nothing changes between us, dear sister, dear heart, nothing.

I swear it, and remain, always,

yr Rabbit, yr Goofo, ever yr Michael

#

Michael,

Love.

Heart.

Soul.

Torment.

Hate you.

#

Michael,–

rabbGoofo,

Tonight I have decided to hate you.

Do I need a reason?

Above me, far above me in yr HOUSE, yr DO MI NO, I can hear yr wife right now. Right now, that Mrs Samantha Van Der Linden, I can hear her moaning as you fuck her. She is moaning yr name, my Michael. She is moaning my man’s name. Too, too, I can hear the other one moaning, that one you gave me, bought me, the colored girl — is she African, you said? I don’t remember their countries over there any more — but her moans are of such a different timbre, her moans are hunger and ache and I suppose soon I shall tire of her again, and kill her, and send her away.

But I will make her you first, won’t I.

I cannot hurt you the way I can hurt the girl, Michael. But I can hurt you. And tonight, while I hear you fucking your wife, your stupid simpleton tramp of a wife — whom you swore to me, you SWORE you had no interest in and were marrying only because the stupid simple bitch took up pregnant — and if I can hear, so too I assure you can the maids and the butler and most especially special of all, your daughter, who should have been mine, she should have been mine– COULD HAVE been mine, but no, you had to plant her in stupid Trampmantha instead.

And so I will tell you first that I have twice had abortions, and one of them was most definitely yours.

And I will tell you also that Father knew nothing.

He knew nothing.

He suspected nothing.

Even the engagement was my own idea, although Father did believe he took it upon himself. I thought perhaps if I contrived to be married to another, you would finally put Samantha aside and take me instead, fight for me.

You did not.

And so I told you Father had discovered us. I forced you into action, you meek little boy of a thing, you simpering fool, you whining, mewling, weak sop of bread.

I forced you to do what you WANTED, what you needed, what everyone wants from the moment they can walk: to kill your father. You were so clever, weren’t you Michael, weren’t you Michael, so proud not only of your cunning but of your DARING! Oh you foolish thing! Your DARING! As if you truly were a war hero instead of a pampered fop stationed at officers’ clubs until the war politely excused itself from the room with downcast eyes and a cough to cover a mumble. As if burning a house as a man sleeps in it is any kind of daring.

I would even wager your tears at the funeral were real, as Father and the maid we’d made — maid we’d made, maid we’d made, made weed maid, mad wed mad — lay in their covered caskets, lowered into the earth. You didn’t think I’d seen, and truthfully I shouldn’t have, I never should have taken the risk. But I saw, oh, yes, I watched, coming out from my hiding spot in your precious Domino.

When first you told me of this house — of your plans to build me a house beneath Samantha’s house, which you didn’t call by that name but it’s how I think of it, “Domino, Samantha’s house,” with my own the downbelow — I was impressed, truly I was, but now I see it is only a cage. The symbolism is all too clear and blunt and clumsy for it to be anything but true. I am that which you bury, and dig up when you need to use my hole. Samantha is that mincing simple thing you’ve elevated.

You may bury me deep, Michael my love, and you may use me until the end of time and a tick beyond, but oh, oh Goofo, oh Rabbit mine, never ever forget the little girl who made you kill your father.

My name is Button Bright. I’m lost. I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t give a damn.

tonight,

and always,

beneath you,

yr

Mia

“On the count of three, you’ll wake up clear-headed, calm, and refreshed. One, two, three.”

McCall’s voice brought Castle back to life, and for a moment he was reminded of Robert Redford again, voicing over some advertisement he might have seen for the rainforest or the national parks or some damn thing. “Well?” Castle asked, and McCall and Katrine shook their heads in unison.

“You don’t remember anything,” McCall said. “Either neither of you has any idea what happened to Lamont Pasmore, or you’re unusually resistant to hypnosis. Mind you — that latter possibility is enough to shed significant doubt on your testimony even in courts that consider hypnosis, which Massachusetts does not except as part of a psychiatrist’s more general testimony. But we’re not in court; and whatever else happens, I won’t testify against you.”

“It won’t come to that,” Castle said, irritated. Not at McCall, but he needed a target. He took a deep breath, forcing himself to keep from lashing out. “Okay, so look. For lack of a better way to put it: what is it we don’t remember? What’s the hole shaped like?”

“I asked Katrine to write her version down while you were under. Why don’t you tell me yours, and we’ll compare.”

“Didn’t you just ask me?”

“Yeah. But I mean your conscious version. For all I know you’ve got some false memories in there too.”

“All right. After Baroni tried to ‘exorcise’ the music box, he decided we’d start again in the downbelow and try it all over.”

“So you left the living room, and you put the music box where?”

“We left it there, as far as I know. I didn’t touch it.”

“Did you see anyone else touch it?”

“No.”

“When’s the next time you remember seeing it?”

Castle shook his head. “I don’t. I assume it’s still there, but I haven’t looked for it. The thing creeps me out — the only reason I haven’t thrown it out is as proof I’m not going nuts.”

“Okay. You left the music box there and went downbelow. In what order?”

“Sorry?”

“Did you lead, did Baroni, what?”

“Oh. I think I did.” He glanced at Katrine, who shrugged. “Yeah, I was in front, and Baroni and Romaglio right next to me. Katrine too. The other priests were behind us, I don’t remember in what order. Baroni went in front when we got to the last set of stairs, and Katrine suggested we hold hands. Ramsey said something about how it wasn’t a seance, but Baroni said it couldn’t hurt, if we were all joined in prayer.”

“Go on.”

“All right. Then –” Castle shook his head. “I remember — Pasmore freaked out — something about Mia’s room, he saw something? He heard something?”

“What do you mean by freak out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he scream?”

“Probably.”

“Do you remember him screaming?”

“No.”

“Do you remember talking about him having screamed?”

“No.”

“Did he babble or go mute?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember him doing so.”

“Did he turn as pale as a sheet?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did he shake, faint, pass out, wheeze, have difficulty breathing, have pain in his chest?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did he say things that made no sense, or see things that weren’t there?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What’s the last thing you remember of Lamont Pasmore?”

Castle had to think about it. “Standing next to Baroni. Speaking Latin.”

“And when was that? Where was that?”

“It was — it was on the last set of stairs. Going down.”

“This is before he freaked out? And before you left the lowest level?”

“Yeah — no. Before he freaked out, but –” He looked to Katrine for confirmation. “I think we went back down to the last floor again. Before coming upstairs.” Katrine nodded slightly, and McCall sighed.

“Katrine, could you go into the other room, please. See if the music box is still there. I don’t want the two of you creating memories together if I can help it.”

“Sure,” she said. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking of it like that.”

“So you went all the way downstairs,” McCall said after she’d left, “and then back up to at least the middle floor of the downbelow — did you go to its top floor?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember doing so?”

“No.”

“And then at some point you went all the way down again, and then presumably came back upstairs.”

“Yeah. We had a lot of wine after the other priests left.”

“Which ones left, and who had the wine?”

“Pasmore, Baroni, Ramsey, and Strabo left. The last three had an earlier flight — Pasmore piggybacked with them because of freaking out. Romaglio, Katrine and I had the wine he’d brought. He brought ten bottles. I’m not sure how much of it we had.”

“Possibly as much as three and a third bottles each?”

“… I guess. Why don’t you have us hooked up to the lie detector for this, by the way?”

“Because I don’t think it would do me any good, the state you two are in. Do you specifically remember Pasmore leaving?”

“No.”

“Do you remember Baroni leaving?”

“I — I don’t remember any of them leaving.”

“Why are you telling me they did, then?”

“Well, I remember talking about them having left, the next morning. Katrine and I woke up together, and we came downstairs and Romaglio offered to make us breakfast.”

“What’d you have?”

“Guanciale — that’s this Roman bacon stuff — eggs, olives, steak, tomatoes.”

“Good breakfast.”

“Yeah.”

“Where did Romaglio sleep?”

“The green room, I think, but I didn’t check.”

“Did he say anything about what had happened the day before, with Pasmore, with the other priests, anything?”

“We talked about the exorcism, about how Baroni agreed something was wrong in the house but that it wasn’t something the rite was aimed at.”

“So not a demon.”

“Right. He blamed me — we had an argument about it. He thinks I’m wallowing in my sins or something, not repenting.”

“Well, he’s a priest, that’s his job. Did he say anything about Pasmore’s freak out that indicated to you he remembered more of it than you do?”

Castle thought about that, too. “None of us were specific about it. He told us Pasmore would receive good treatment, you know, from the Church.”

“Treatment for what?”

“Stress, I guess. Or — like from a breakdown. Psychiatric treatment.”

“So it was serious, this freak out.”

“Yeah.”

“Serious enough Pasmore could have snuck back in the house maybe? Done that to himself?”

“Is it even possible to do that to yourself? I mean, the way his hands were –”

“It’s possible. It would leave signs, but the scene’s been eradicated. There’s no way to tell now.”

“Good old Uncle Jonathan.”

“Your uncle does his job, I do mine. It’s how it goes. I’m used to working around people. How did the other priests react? Cardinal Baroni, Fathers Ramsey and Strabo?”

“To what?”

“Pasmore freaking out.”

“I — don’t remember specifically.”

“You remember generally?”

“I have a sense of their having been there.”

“That’s not a memory.” McCall looked up as Katrine came back in, and nodded at her. “C’mon back. Music box?”

“No joy,” she said, shaking her head. “Someone must have taken it downstairs?”

He sat back and looked at his yellow notebook, sighing a little. “I don’t like what I’m seeing here, kids.”

“Yeah,” Castle said, “Well, I haven’t liked it either.”

“Someone dies, that makes things more complicated, you understand? Emotions get more het up. The consequences of a hoax are far more severe, as is the danger to me if I begin to suspect it’s a hoax.”

“It isn’t a hoax. Not from me, anyway. Christ, if it’s a hoax or not, he’s dead.”

“That’s what I’m saying. This isn’t you seeing someone die through the window. This is you not seeing someone die, and them dying anyway. This isn’t funny bullshit, creaks and rattles and voices. This is someone dying, one way or the other. I’m saying, I take everything more carefully now. And I step things up a notch.”

“All right, so what’s that mean for me?”

“What it means for you is that I’m going to talk to your uncle, first of all, and see if I can convince him that it isn’t safe for you to be here. I know he’s not inclined to believe a ‘ghost hunter.’ But I have references. Friends of his. Men he respects. It also means I’m going to bring in a forensics engineer –”

“What’s that?”

“A guy who can do a walk-through in the building, tell me about its construction, when and how it was built, whether things were torn down to make room for it, that kind of thing. We’re going to work up a history of the house, see. A map in time.”

“All right. All right, yeah, that sounds good. What else? What kind of — like –”

“Ghostbusting equipment do I have?”

Castle grinned weakly. “Yeah.”

“I don’t.”

“But –”

“That’s just not how it works. There’s no — EMP bomb, or laser ray, or — there just isn’t. There isn’t anything like that. All I can do is find them. If there’s something that can be talked to –”

“Talked to?”

“Sometimes you can talk to them.”

“Like magic words?”

“Only in the please and thank you sense.”

“I’m feeling a little fucked here, McCall. I’m really feeling a little fucked.”

#

They spent the rest of the evening, through dinner — sandwiches Katrine was happy to retrieve from Revere, and bottles of Sam Adams — following McCall around and helping him install equipment, stuff to monitor — well, everything. In every way.

“Thermometers,” McCall said, explaining everything — sometimes tersely, needing prodding to elaborate — as they strung it up, hung it up, tacked it up, or propped it up. “Both mercury — except they’re not actually made with mercury anymore — and digital. Sometimes you get different readings with each. Sometimes electronics go wonky. We’re all about redundancy and extra redundancy in this industry.” One of each went in every room on every floor, upontop and downbelow, and a few extra in doorways.

“DAT recorders.” He measured out distances with an electronic tape measure type thing that used a laser pointer. “Digital audio tape. Some of them are voice-activated. Some you can control on your remotes.” He’d handed each of them a remote control, like a pocket calculator but smaller, with a chain to keep it around their necks. “Press the big red button, it’ll start recording from whatever unit’s closest to you. Easy as pie and twice as handy.”

“Digital camcorders.” Again with the distance measuring, this time playing out angles to leave everything covered. “Closed-circuit, with backups of everything modemed off to my server at home. I’m piggybacking off of your wireless network in the house, but any time it can’t get through to that, it’ll go cellular. I won’t watch a room you’re in unless you ask me to. Green button there pages me, lets me know where you are.”

He nodded at a few of the cameras, here and there. “Some of them are motion-sensitive — they’ll only turn on when something’s in the room, something it can pick up. Lets us filter through the noise, make sure we don’t miss the important stuff when we’re fast-forwarding through hours of empty kitchen. Some of them are plain-light. Some of them are infrared. The plain-light cameras all have low-light intensifiers so they can catch things at night without needing to flip the lights on. This is going to cost you a lot of money.”

Castle grunted. “A lot of money, I have.”

“Electro-static detectors. Negative ion detectors. Air quality monitors. Meters for humidity, air pressure, and air current direction. I’m telling you right now we can expect a few dozen false positives a day, because I’m setting this bitch up tighter and more paranoid than a chaperone at recovering slut camp. No offense, Katrine.”

“None taken,” she said, and then after a moment, “Wait, fuck you.”

“What’re those?” Castle asked, when McCall started stringing up threads of what looked like stopwatches across every hallway and in every room. Hundreds of them, all told.

“Watches,” he said.

“So we always know what time it is. Great.”

“Very exact digital watches,” McCall amplified. “They’re all synchronized down to the hundredth of a second. If they don’t stay that way –”

“– it’s because something spooky’s going on.”

“Right.”

When the last of the watches were strung up, the cameras followed. “Still cameras this time,” McCall said.

“Why,” Katrine asked, “what’d they turn into last time?”

“No. Still cameras. Regular cameras, not video cameras. We have multiples of every combination of: cameras set to go off at random intervals; cameras set to go off at regular intervals; cameras set to go off when you click the purple button on your remote; cameras that take plain or low-light images; cameras that take ultraviolet images; cameras that take infrared images; normal exposure; very fast exposure; very slow exposure. Your photo album could fill a library, by the time we’re done.”

“Great. Great. All right — what else?”

“Two more things. You see those vents I put in, everywhere you said you’d heard a noise?”

“Yeah.”

“Hit the button next to them or the white button on your remote, and flour puffs out.”

“Flour?”

“Flour. Footprints show up in flour. Pawprints too. When all you have is twenty dollars to investigate a haunting, you buy a flashlight, a disposable camera, and a bag of flour.”

“All right,” Castle said. “Good to know.”

“What’s the second thing?” Katrine asked, and McCall opened one of the last duffel bags.

“Delta-range electro magnetic field detectors,” he said, carefully handing each of them a small doohickey that looked like an off-brand Palm Pilot. “This is the one thing that looks Ghostbuster-y. That thing Egon had, with the lights on it? That was a Hollywood version of an EMF detector. These are very, very expensive. Top of the line and absolutely mainstream science. They can pick up brain activity from across the room.”

“Wow,” Castle said. “Okay. So. I can tell if ghosts are thinking?”

“You can tell if anything’s thinking. If it’s something that works that way. Or if it’s an animal — it’ll pick up any mammal at a pretty decent range — or person, like you were thinking at first. Like if Pasmore had snuck back here, was hiding in a dark room, that kind of thing — point this at the room, and there you go.”

“This all sounds like detection type stuff,” Katrine said. “Like you were saying — no extermination type stuff.”

“Yeah. It’s just to find them. Avoid them, maybe. If Castle’s stuck here — well, if nothing else, maybe there are dangerous rooms and clean rooms. Maybe you can treat it like asbestos. Learn how to keep from digging it up. It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s had to do that.”

“I can’t decide if this is going to make me sleep easier,” Castle said, “because I have all these ways to assure myself nothing’s wrong — or make me paranoid and scream my throat blue as soon as something looks funny.”

“Well in the meantime,” McCall said, “Ricky Tremaine found two of the old Domino servants for us. First off, no, nobody who worked here was ever named Mia, unless they worked under the table. Second, the question is do you want us to interview them off-site, or bring them here? Might be harder, the second.”

“Who’ve you got?”

“Michael Junior’s wetnurse — she’s in her eighties now — and one of the gatehouse guards, who’s in his seventies. They’re both old, cranky New Englanders, but you know what that means.”

“Get em talking and they love to gab and gossip.”

“Righto. So?”

“Bring em here, if they’ll agree to it.”

“You don’t think they will, though, do you.” McCall sounded curious.

Castle shook his head. “I wouldn’t if I were them. If I were them, the moment I got out of this house, I’d never fucking come back.”

#

“‘What’d they turn into last time?’” Castle asked, when McCall had left and they were sitting in the living room by themselves again, with the television on MTV and the volume down low.

“What?” Katrine glanced at him, the rabbity look or something like it back in her eyes.

“The ’still cameras’ comment. You were doing the ‘cutting the tension with humor by acting stupid’ thing girls do.”

“Guys do it too.”

“But not to cut the tension. You didn’t tell him what Jonathan told you, either.”

She shook her head but wouldn’t look at him, glancing vaguely in the direction of the television without paying attention to the sneakers some pop idol was pushing. “We haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet. I didn’t see any reason to bring it up with Mr McCall.”

“Okay,” he said, “so let’s talk about it.”

She got up and went to the kitchen, coming back with a bottle of beer left over from lunch, and settled back down into the couch, a foot tucked under her and her free arm on the side of the couch. One of those poses that looked casual but also looked like she was ready to propel herself over or on top of him should the need arise. “Your uncle said you killed three women.”

“It’s true,” he said. “I did. The first was an accident. My girlfriend. Rachael. I told you about her. We were having sex, and I was choking her — she liked that. But she suffocated, and she died. I called my family, and they helped me make it look like a drug overdose. No one who didn’t work for us ever suspected.”

“The other two?” she asked cagily.

He closed his eyes and leaned back, not answering until she prodded him with her foot. “Ingrid was a waitress,” he said. “At a restaurant I used to go to a lot when I was in town. We made a lot of eye contact. You know. A lot of the flirting you do when you see someone a lot but don’t know who they are. Then I ran into her at a bondage club — which was like, boom, redirecting all that flirt-energy into this brick-solid need to fuck. We did, for most of a weekend. When I had her tied up, and my hands on her throat, I thought –”

He stopped, even when she prodded him again, until she asked. “Come on. Just tell me. If I’ve heard it from your uncle, how can it be made any worse by my hearing it from you?”

He nodded. “I thought, I wonder when it was? When Rachael died? I wonder why I didn’t notice, the exact moment, like a — like an alarm, or an elastic breaking, you know? A lightbulb doesn’t fade out, it doesn’t dim. It just blows, all at once. Why wasn’t it like that? And if it was, why didn’t I notice?”

“So you killed the waitress.”

“So I killed the waitress. I didn’t — I was going to say, I didn’t mean to, but I did mean to. It’s just that I wasn’t thinking of it as killing at the time. But oh it got me hard. Oh when she struggled — when she kicked — when she twisted … I mean, I’ve played hard. I’ve played really hard, with women who knew how to play, how to get seriously kinky and push the edges. But nothing, none of them, none of it was anything like when a woman’s really dying. The strength she finds before she loses the fuel for it. The way she’ll twist hard enough to hurt herself, to try to get away. Oh my God. You just — it was unbelievable. Unbelievable. I can’t ever forget it.”

He glanced at her, and her eyes were like wet foreign coins. “You liked it?”

“Not afterwards. Afterwards I did enough coke and bluebonnets to convince myself I’d been off my nut. But I hadn’t — I’d been totally sober when I fucked her, when I killed her. I’d had, maybe, a glass of Scotch. Hours earlier.”

“And your family took care of that one too?”

He nodded briefly. “I lied to them. I told her she had a heart attack. There was no autopsy, but my mother, I think, suspected.”

“Your uncle said — he said the third one — you did her different. Those were his words. ‘He did her different.’”

Castle wanted to punch Jonathan. Jonathan, who’d been the most consoling of the family when Castle went to them for help — who’d told him everything would be fine, and that he just had to keep his head and keep from panicking. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Yeah, I did. The third time, the third time was Grace, and I was very high. We’d taken ecstasy in the morning — first thing, you know, so that your day just … glows? And at some point we took some AMT.”

“And you tied her up? You didn’t tie her up, did you?”

“I didn’t tie her up. She wanted to take a bath. After we’d had some sex — a lot of sex — and there was this thing she liked, this golden shower thing — and she said we should have sex in the hot tub, the hotel room had this little hot tub in it, because the hot water made her pussy tighter. So I fucked her in the hot tub — but I couldn’t come. I mean, hours went by, three hours, we were fucking, off and on, and I couldn’t come. I could stay hard, just like normal, but I couldn’t come. So I bent her over — and I was fucking her ass, and she kept laughing, and she said she loved the way the water felt on her, because of the drugs. That it felt like hands — like every little wave, every splash, felt like hands. Small, feathery hands.”

Katrine nodded.

“She was laughing, and then she choked a little, because she’d swallowed some of the water. She’d bent down too far while laughing. God, she was so high. We were both so fucking high. And I shoved her head right fucking under. I just held it under, and held it under, and she started kicking again, and she felt so tight around my cock, and I felt enormous, I mean I just had this huge fucking three foot Steve McQueen robot cock growing out of my crotch, you know? I could’ve fucked a moon crater at that point. I was going to let her up. I did for a minute — she was screaming underwater, do you know what that sounds like? Screaming underwater and I let go, and her head flew up and banged the faucet. Her head was bleeding, just everywhere, and she was sputtering but knocked out.”

“So you pushed her under again.”

“I pushed her under again until I came. One hand on her head. One hand on her hip. Fucking her, eyes closed, not looking at the blood, pretending it wasn’t there, but I could feel it — or imagined I did — floating on the surface like an oil spill, like this piss warmth spreading over my legs when it reached me. And when it touched me, I came, and she died.”

“How did you feel then? Did you like it? Did you feel guilty?”

He stared at a point in the corner of the television set. “I didn’t feel anything at all. I felt wet and spent. My back was sore, and my hands had pruned from the water. I had met her at a party. Her cousin was dating an actor.”

“You called your family?”

“I called my lawyer. He called my uncle. My uncle called my mother. My mother called her shrink. It was this big thing. There was no hiding it. Once was an accident. Twice was suspicious. At this point they don’t even believe Rachael was an accident, not anymore. For months, at least two of the people who knew what I’d done — my mother, my uncle, my cousins, my half-brother and half-sister, four of our lawyers, two of our shrinks, and a butler — stayed with me at any given time, either in the room with me or in the next room over.”

“While they were getting Domino ready for you.”

“Yeah.”

She leaned forward on her leg, peering at him. “Do you still feel like killing someone?”

“I didn’t feel like it even when I did it,” he said honestly.

“Do you think you’ll do it again?”

“No. No, whatever it was — whatever weird compulsion — like picking at a scab, or smoking unfiltered cigarettes, or fucking women you don’t even like — I’m done with it now.”

She rocked back and forth on her leg, and they didn’t say anything, just watched television. One music video after another, with long breaks of commercials and talking heads. She just rocked back and forth, sitting on her foot, scooting against it, and finally she leaned her head on the couch and looked at him with pale young eyes.

“Would you do it if I asked you to?”

“What more do I need to do with you, Castle?” Jonathan asked. The deep baritone orator voice had kicked in, the one from CSPAN and campaign stumping, the one that sounded like Peter Graves after a few whiskeys: Castle was more and more sure that was Jonathan’s default voice now, and that the friendlier one was a mask he put on just for interviewers and occasional family members. “Must I post guards, and prevent you from having visitors? Shall I arrange a more formal confinement for you, in a more supervised locale? If you’d like to get better, there are institutions which would accept you, beyond the reach of extradition. If you’d rather retain access to a television and Gamebox, it would take me all of forty-two seconds to present the relevant evidence to the relevant authorities. Forty-two seconds. I bring up the file, I type in the password, I forward it to the FAX machines with an assurance that the originals and physical evidence are available. You could spend the next twenty years of your life in prison, nephew, assuming they go easy on you. They do not often go easy on serial killers.”

“Jonathan –”

“You realize that’s what you are, don’t you? You’re a serial killer. You have both method and madness. Goddammit, boy! The Hanovers might have withstood this, but that was over a century ago, and they were a monarchy. We must be elected. We must be chosen. Our status depends on the constant and daily affirmation of the people who elevated us. How would your father feel about this? Is that why you’ve done it? Are you trying to shame him, since he’s no longer alive to give his approval? Your mother won’t stop talking about the psychology books she reads, the criminology books, one after another –”

“Jonathan, you piece of shit, listen to me. I didn’t kill the priest. I haven’t killed anyone since — since coming to Domino. And for months before that.”

“Listen to you,” Jonathan said, disgust — and maybe something like fear — in his voice. “You haven’t killed anyone lately, you say. Oh, we’re all so proud. I’m sure a man who’s strangled two women and drowned another can be trusted! After all, the priest was a man — you don’t kill men, do you, Castle? You don’t kill men.”

“Romaglio was with me the whole time. He can vouch for me. Romaglio, for God’s sake — you’ve known him longer than I have, our families go way back. If you can’t trust him, what do you expect me to do?”

“I haven’t got the interest or inclination to discourse on the lengthy topic of my expectations of you, nephew.”

“And another thing. It’s GameCube. Not Gamebox. The Nintendo GameCube. Christ, how do you keep foreign policy straight if you can’t even remember brand names?”

“Are you finished with your outburst?” The voice of oration became one of patient amusement. “I will speak to Romaglio, Castle. You may spend the next twenty hours or so wondering what will become of you, because I am not the least bit convinced that you have so much as begun to learn your lesson. In the meantime, men will come. Men will come to the house I have bought for you, in order to dispose of the corpse I am most convinced — one way or the other — would not have become a corpse if not for your presence there. They will clean up the blood. They will make the body disappear. They will erase the traces completely enough that the most advanced forensics equipment in the world would not discover their shadow nor residue: because these men work in forensics, Castle, and on the cutting edge of the technologies I employ them to subvert. I do this because our family is not simply powerful, not simply important. Do you know why I do this, Castle? Is there enough of your father in you, some echo carried in his squirt, for you to understand?”

“Spell it out for me, Uncle Jonathan.”

“The family is important, Castle. It’s family. What does family do? It gives you a place to come from, a place to learn from, and a place to come back to. It gives you a place in the world. It gives you people to watch out for you, people you have a connection to even if you haven’t met them. The Finch family isn’t just our family, Castle. It’s one of America’s families, one of the free world’s families. Other countries have their royalties and nobilities, their Windsors hiding an old German name because they don’t want people to think they’re Nazis, their princes with swords and mustaches, wearing medals from wars they only saw on paper. America just has families. Kennedy. Rockefeller. Barrymore. Maybe Trump someday. And Finch. Some men are born with silver spoons in their mouths, Castle, but you were born with history in yours, and you spat it out. You could have been part of an immortality.”

Castle could hear ice clinking in a glass on the other end of the phone, and poured a drink for himself as well, sloshing a little Scotch from the decanter on the sideboard into a rocks glass and spooning a trickle of ice water over it to bring out the tones. It was Jonathan who’d introduced him to Scotch, wasn’t it? Maybe it was Preston. “You really can’t stand me, can you Jonathan. Why is that? Because I’m my father’s heir? Because my ‘line’ is the one to the throne, not yours? For all your talk of us not being a monarchy, you wouldn’t think that’d matter any. Most of Dad’s property was part of the Finch Trust — it doesn’t go to me, it stays with the estate, and Grandpa’s the executor, not me. For all the good it does him.” Preston Finch had emphysema and most of a lung missing, and the treatments that kept him alive also kept him too doped up to enjoy it: Jonathan had had power of attorney and practical control over the Finch Trust for six years. “Is he still in the dark?”

“We will not,” Jonathan said coldly, “under any circumstances, inform my father of your recent misadventures. If you speak to him, you will bear this in mind.”

“Yeah.”

“And I don’t hate you, Castle. Lately, you are alternately a frustration and a monster. I cannot hate that. I can only regret it.”

“The hell with that, it goes back further than this. You’ve never liked me. I don’t mean hated, and I don’t mean you were a shit. You just didn’t like me.”

There was a long pause. “What bothers me, Castle, is … no, that’s too long a list for that verb. Many things bother me. Many things about you, your life, and your values bother me. One of those things is how abridged your memory is. Do you remember when you were ten, and I brought you and Melissa to the Canary Islands with me?”

“I remember walking in on you and — was it the junior Senator from Michigan?”

“That was when you were sixteen, and Kathryn was the Senator-elect, not yet the Senator. It was Christmas. The time I’m talking about, you were ten years old, Melissa was twelve, and it was just the three of us.”

Castle thought for a moment. “The summer after Aunt Becka died. Mom was on her honeymoon with Lightman.”

“Yes. Did I hate you then?”

They had spent most of the time on the beaches — which Jonathan always loved, because it gave him a chance to show that he was in better shape than most of the men in the Senate — and on tours of the ancient Mediterranean forests, which he hated. They’d jetskied and wind-surfed, and the hotel they stayed in most of the time was next to the ruins of an old monastery that had been sacked by North African pirates in the sixteenth century. “No,” he said finally. “Or if you did, you did a damn good job hiding it.”

“As I recall, that was the week you told me you saw a topless woman for the first time — God bless the sands of Europe — and asked if I was going to marry your mother next, and be your new father. Not that I suggest a connection between the two conversations.”

Castle actually laughed a little. “I forgot about that. Christ. I was ten? That sounds like something a five year old would say.”

“No — you just think it does, because you forget how young you were. Your sense of time and proportion have never been good, Castle. Perhaps it’s because you’re an only child with no children of your own. A man never grows up until he learns to appreciate children. He only remains in that twilight of adolescence, proud of his own adulthood.”

“C’mon, there were Ted and Jennifer, and your girls.”

“Jennifer was six years younger than you — Ted moreso — and you spent considerable time in different boarding schools, with no real observation of each others’ growth. Nor, I think, can we consider you to have grown up with Melissa and Trina. You have been a child, nephew, for far too long. What do you think your life would have been like, had you not been a Finch? What would you have done with it?”

“Well, I would’ve been a lot less rich.”

Jonathan waited, and then, “Is that all? Is that really the only difference you see? You’re thirty-three: have you had any real jobs, anything that wasn’t a passing fancy? Anything remotely resembling a career, a productive passion?”

“Oh Christ, Jonathan, spare me the spoiled rich boy lecture. It’s not like you’re in the Senate out of some burning need to participate in democracy and the legislative process.”

“But I do have a passion for it, boy. I enjoy my days and the activity therein: not all of it, no, and there is a great deal of the job I either dislike or would dislike if I did not delegate it. There is much of it I like less than I think Jacob did. But I still enjoy being busy. I enjoy having something to do every day as much as I enjoy the freedom to take time off from it. This is something I think you have never felt yourself — you’ve never been busy. You’ve been frantic — pursuing one fleeting interest after another, whether an occupation you were dabbling in or a woman you were seducing — but never busy.”

“Gee, I guess that’s why I went on a killing spree.” He meant it to come out sarcastic, dismissive, and realized the instant he said it that there was no way to be sarcastic and dismissive when you really had killed three people and had a fourth corpse in your basement.

“I won’t even begin to determine the causes there,” Jonathan said. “Maybe you were just born wrong. Maybe you needed a stronger male figure in your life earlier. Maybe these things can’t be plotted out that way in graphs and flowcharts. Your father always believed psychology was more art than science, no more exact or instructable than painting. I myself have not given it the same careful consideration he did.”

“Dad was a thinker.”

“Don’t be a fool. Your father was no abstract philosopher. He would have been President: and you, by now, would be a Congressman in one of the Southern states, the subject of popular gubernatorial speculation. Your father was a practical man, driven, goal-oriented. He happened to be brilliant, but that was the least of his gifts — gifts which could have been yours, if you had chosen to develop them, instead of being a — a professional couch potato. Did you decide that if you could not replace him, you would ignore his legacy? Did you worry that following in his footsteps would seem presumptuous? Every man must someday replace his father’s place in his own life — you persist in clinging to the corpse of yours, and it disgusts me as it would have him.”

“Uncle Jonathan,” Castle said, with a touch of genuine wonder, “you miss him.”

“Christ, boy, I more than miss him. I loved Jacob, more than you ever could, and looked up to him just as you should have. I’m no fool — I know his death helped the family, not the same way his life would have, nor as much — but helped it all the same. The Kennedys have their Jack. We have our Jacob.”

“They have Bobby too,” Castle murmured after a sip of Scotch. “Don’t forget Bobby.”

“It is not too late for us to even the score,” Jonathan said quietly.

Katrine came into the room at that point, looking timid and quiet and pale. “Hey,” she said quietly, and Castle waved her down. By the look of her, she’d just gotten tired of being alone in a room when there was still a dead body downstairs and no idea how it got there.

“Is that the whore?” Jonathan asked immediately. “Is that your whore?”

“Christ, Jonathan, stow it. How do you even know about Katrine?”

“I’m not entirely unaware of the goings-on, Castle.”

Castle sighed. For a moment, when Katrine had been in the other room and there’d been a house between him and death, he’d been able to lose himself in old family grievances, in the rhythms of relation. Jonathan was right: family was something to come home to, something that wasn’t just familiar but created and defined the familiar, imprinted you with the way you’d expect meatloaf to taste, with turns of phrase that never lost their resonance, with a calendar of holidays that might be penciled over or expanded but was never erased. It was a song you could enter mid-verse and you’d always know the words, always be able to shout out the “five golden rings” in the chorus.

But a house had a rhythm too. A house had a secret life. It might start out as base structure: with a bedroom here and a study there, the way a family had a father here and daughters there. But it developed a life, a habit, a system of behavior and expectation. It began to create familiarity. It took on that smell that only struck you if you didn’t live there. The things you’d only notice if they didn’t belong to you. The more familiar it became, the more alien. The more lived-in, the more possessive. The more you loved it, the less it loved the world. A house was family. A house was home.

And when he left the rhythms of family and came back to the rhythms of home, he slipped his fear back on like a housecoat, finding its pockets still had the same things in them, and the fabric still knew his shape and adopted his smell. When his bickering with Jonathan was interrupted, he remembered that something or someone had killed a man in a house he couldn’t leave, and he had no idea what it was or why he wasn’t aware of it happening. That something had spoken to him on the phone in another woman’s voice, and made him believe Katrine killed the neighbor girl. That something was lost, and it didn’t care where it came from.

“Listen Jonathan,” Castle said finally. “I need you to take this seriously. Right now I’m beyond caring what you blame me for and how you see me. You can cut off my access to the Trust. You can take me out of the house — Jesus Christ, please do, and if you want to put me in some fifth-floor walk-up in Southie, by all means, feel fucking free. I’d love to get out of here.”

“Yes,” Jonathan said, “that’s rather the point of house arrest.”

“I don’t think you understand. Something is wrong with this house. Why do you think Rommy was here? Why do you think he brought four fucking priests with him? They were exorcists. It didn’t work –”

“– and one of them is dead now.”

“– but they agreed that something is very wrong. I’ve been hearing things. I’m not the only one. There have been voices. And — seeing things that weren’t real.”

“The serial killer confesses his insanity. How novel.”

“Not to mention, did you know there’s a whole fucking house underneath this one?”

“What on Earth is that supposed to mean?”

“That’s where we found Pasmore.”

“Ah, ‘we.’ Your whore has been with you all along, then.”

“We found him in the downbelow. The basement isn’t a basement. It’s three stories of full-fledged house, and the people who lived there were goddamn crazy. Maybe they’re haunting the place. I don’t know. I don’t believe in that shit, but maybe I should.”

“You sound like a child who doesn’t want to go to sleep and complains of the monster under his bed, or in his closet. The only monster in Domino is you, Castle.”

Castle sighed and downed the rest of the Scotch in the glass. “But you’ll talk to Romaglio.”

“Yes. Do you know the two of us were boys together?”

“Well, I can do the math.”

“No, you simpleton. We were friends as boys. Romaglio, your father, and I. We met at boarding school — I forget now which one, though I believe it was not in Italy. He spent a summer with us at the estate, when we were young — when Mother was still alive.”

“I never knew her.”

“Obviously not. She was a good woman, a kind woman. Demanding, but she only demanded what she knew we could give. But she let Romaglio visit, if he agreed to speak Italian with us at meals — it would keep us in our studies, she said, as well as allow her to practice her command of the tongue. The estate grew wilder then — it was not as common, as it is now, to landscape things so precisely, and we lived far enough outside Boston that there was no local landscaping company such as we use now. The wilderness came closer to the house, and I believe Mother liked it that way — she grew up in the country, you know.”

“Yes,” Castle said quietly. “I’ve heard.”

“There were wild strawberries then. They grew along the slope, a wild, gnarled patch of them that the birds would feast on, flocks of crows. They loved the strawberries. Mother was always worried they’d go after the flowers next, but they never did, and they didn’t linger long enough to shit on the lawn. We had a tennis court out there back then — just a square of grass kept neat, with a net. Manuel kept it trimmed so you could see the lines without having to lay chalk down — he hated the idea of putting chalk powder on the lawn.”

“I remember those wild strawberries.”

“No, you don’t. Manuel uprooted them at the end of that summer. Romaglio was fascinated both by the strawberries and the crows: in each case, the American sort is not present in Europe, and in particular there was one old crow, a white one, among the flock, whom Rommy would come out to see, as fascinated as a child at the lions’ cage. The crows attacked us eventually, of course — not seriously, but all three of us were pecked enough to bleed, and that was enough for Mother. She demanded Manuel destroy the plants, so the crows wouldn’t come back.”

“A white crow?” Castle asked. “Those are pretty rare.” McCall had mentioned them. Although he hadn’t actually said how rare they were, but that was sort of implied in his analogy. The coincidence of hearing a white crow mentioned twice in a few days bothered him.

“I can’t recall having seen one since.” Jonathan paused as if in thought. “I will speak to Romaglio, Castle, and I want you to understand: I have known him for considerably longer than you have been alive. He will not lie to me — and I would know if he did. Neither of us will consider you kindly if you are using his name as a shield you do not merit. Do you understand? I am giving you an opportunity to come clean.”

“I didn’t kill the priest,” Castle said. “Romaglio was with me. He freaked out — we were talking about it this morning, how the priest freaked out. For some reason I thought he’d left. But whatever it is that’s wrong with this house — that’s what killed him. Why this house, anyway? Why did you buy it?”

Jonathan snorted. “It was cheap, in large part. The Finch Trust bought out most of the assets of the Trimalchio Trust ages ago — acquiring the house was non-suspicious, should we be audited, and easy to do on short notice.”

“Did we know the Van Der Lindens? I mean, did you –”

“The previous owners? No. Their daughter, I met once or twice at social functions, fundraisers and the like. Her parents were old long before I was, though.”

“Yeah,” Castle said. “Listen –” The door resounded with a hard, rapid knock, and the doorbell succeeded it. “Hang on. There’s someone at the door. I’m going to pass you over to Katrine.”

“Wonderful,” Jonathan said dryly.

Castle tossed Katrine the phone on his way to the foyer. “Tell him everything you’ve seen,” he said. “Everything you’ve heard, everything strange and bizarre and fucked up.”

The men at the door looked like plumbers, but he knew they weren’t. Even with their toolboxes and overalls, even with the plumbing company name on the dingy beige van outside, they weren’t plumbers. But they cleaned up leaks. “Jonathan Finch sent us,” the first one said, with a voice like a rusty wrench.

“Yeah,” Castle said. “Can I see some kind of — identification, or, something?”

The man unfolded a FAX with nothing on it but Domino’s address and Jonathan’s signature. “Everything else, we did in email, you understand me?”

“Got it,” Castle said. “Come on. I’ll show you the room.”

The plumber grunted. “Good pup.”

Castle bit his tongue to keep from responding to that, and led the men downstairs to the downbelow. None of them commented on the walk to the gatehouse and down the almost-hidden stairs, but he could sense them wanting to. When he brought them to Mia’s room, one of them made a strangled noise in his throat, like he was choking something down.

“Can you handle it?” Castle asked, disturbingly happy to have shaken them up.

“Yeah,” the plumber said. “Give us a few hours. We’ll let you know when we’re done.”

When Castle came back upstairs, Katrine was sitting down, looking pale and shaken herself, and she wasn’t saying anything into the phone, but that cellphone bleed mumble was audible, so Jonathan was still talking. Castle took the phone from her, and caught Jonathan in mid-speech, that amused, cruel tone.

“The third one,” Jonathan said, “he didn’t strangle. Maybe he started to — by then I wasn’t risking medical examiners. But he fucked her from behind in the bathtub, while her head was underwater. She had a gash in the back of her head where she’d hit it on the faucet, like she was struggling to get up. A four-inch gash with a lot of blood, that would’ve needed stitches if he hadn’t killed her. The water was red from all the blood — head wounds bleed considerably. There she is, bleeding, the water turning crimson, and he just kept fucking her. Maybe he kept fucking her even after she died. Maybe he fucked all of them after they died. He did it because he liked it.”

“Jesus Christ, Jonathan,” Castle said finally. “What the fuck?”

“Oh, hello again, nephew,” Jonathan said. “I was just informing our young and impressionable friend what sort of man she had exposed herself to. I know whores like to stay safe. You must be paying her a great deal — is it just cash, or coke too? — for her to be willing to fuck you in that big spooky house that’s out to get you.”

“Goddammit. What is it you want from me, Jonathan? Just to rot here? Just to suffer?”

“I want you to see how easily this all could have been avoided. I want you to see that your crimes extend far beyond the murders. I know about your father, you know.”

“Yeah, you keep saying how well you knew him and how well I didn’t.”

“Castle. I know about your father. What I can’t figure out is how you do. He didn’t keep a journal. I’m positive of that. If there were any photographs, I would have found and destroyed them long ago.”

“What are you talking about?” But Castle knew. He always told people the first memory he had was of his father dying at the circus. That’s what they wanted to hear. But he was too old for that to be his first memory.

“Your father’s ‘kink.’ His ’special thing,’ he called it. A Thai whore introduced him to it, you know. We never knew her name, or if she said it we didn’t understand. She pushed his head under the water, and another whore sucked him off while he held his breath. Back and forth, up and down, half-suffocating until he came.”

“Jesus,” Castle said.

“So?”

“I walked in on him once. In St Thomas. There was only one woman, but he was on his hands and knees in the bathtub with the water running — she was over him, straddling him –”

“Was she fucking him?” Jonathan asked, with mild curiosity.

“No. I think she was jacking him off. But his head was under the water –”

“You must have been very young.”

“I think I was four. He said she was washing his hair, like the woman at the salon did for me sometimes.”

“Yes.”

“That’s got nothing to do with anything.”

“You foolish, foolish fuck. Of course it does, Castle. Your father liked being drowned, and then he died. You grew up refusing to live up to his shadow, and then you started killing women. Suffocating them. Drowning one.”

“It was an accident. Rachael was an accident. Jesus, you’ve been listening to too many of Mom’s psychology rambles.”

“Rachael might have been. Ingrid and Grace weren’t.”

Castle didn’t say anything.

“What I want, Castle,” Jonathan said, “is for you to grow up.”

“Fuck you, Jonathan.”

Castle flipped the phone shut, shaking angrily, and poured himself another Scotch, spilling some of it on the table. Katrine watched him with wary, wide, rabbit eyes.

The kitchen smelled like sweet, spitting fat, and Castle’s stomach rumbled even though he was a little hungover from the Italian wines Rommy had brought and shared the night before. Rommy had insisted on making breakfast, and Castle let him even though it meant using up some of the guanciale the Cardinal’d brought him from Rome.

Katrine huddled over a cup of black coffee with honey, looking like she’d been dragged through the coals and rolled over rocks, which was about how Castle felt. Rommy’d brought ten bottles of wine — how many were left?

“So what’s this stuff cooking, anyway?” Katrine asked, resting her head over the coffee mug and looking all of thirteen years old. “It smells like bacon on crack.”

“It is bacon on crack,” Castle said. “It’s this Roman bacon stuff I get whenever I’m there. I’m not sure what part of the pig it’s from, –”

“The jowl,” Rommy said from the kitchen. “It’s cured pork jowl.”

“– because every time Rommy tells me, I block it out. But it’s crispy and salty and has just a little hot pepper in it, and I’m pretty sure I’ve been hungover every damn time I’ve had it.”

“Don’t blame the pig for that,” Rommy murmured, and moments later he came out with a platter of food: grilled slices of tomato with thin slices of hard cheese on top; the guanciale, crackling-crispy in some places and puffy in others from frying in the olive oil; briny olives stuffed with green walnuts and pistachios; seared slices of steak still blood-red in the middle; poached eggs pink with tomato sauce; and a scattering of sage leaves and drizzle of olive oil over everything, with a loaf of bread verging on stale to sop it up. “The bread is a travesty, but there’s no bakery in this neighborhood and it will have to do.”

“Jesus Christ,” Katrine said, taking a new mug of coffee from the tray and leaning over the table to peer at the food. “Look at all that.”

“When I was in seminary,” the aging Cardinal said, “We ate like this every Sunday morning, in order to make it to Mass no matter what we’d been up to the previous night. Trust an old man, Katrine. This is a hangover cure extraordinary. And it was easy to cook.”

“As long as there’s guanciale,” Castle said, taking a piece that was still piping-hot and left orange spots on his white linen napkin, from the chile peppers it had been cured with.

They all ate in silence for awhile, sipping hot sweet coffee and clearing the platter bite by bite until their hands were pushing against each other to sop up the last bits of steak juice and olive oil with the stale bread. “What did I tell you?” Romaglio asked.

“Okay,” Katrine said. “You were right, good stuff. I’m still hungry, though.” She turned to Castle. “Mind if I grab something from the kitchen?”

He shook his head. “Go ahead, go ahead. I’m gonna go sit somewhere more comfortable.” He got up, and moved into the living room, coffee mug in hand, and Romaglio followed him, staring at him expectantly. “What?” he asked.

“Did you sleep together last night?”

“I’m not giving confession right now, Your Eminence. Is that any of your business?”

“I’m just saying, Castle. No, the exorcism didn’t amount to anything. However convinced Baroni is that something’s amiss in the house, he wasn’t able to do anything about it. Perhaps the problem is your doing after all.”

“Oh, come on,” Castle said. “The music box? You think I jiggered the music box myself somehow?”

“No no. That perhaps your lifestyle has finally become your undoing. The Church does not believe in the Eastern notion of ‘karma,’ Castle, not by that name, but the concept as it’s popularly expressed by westerners is largely sound: deeds attract consequences. Their relationship needn’t be causal.”

“So you’re saying I deserve this shit, is what you’re saying. Not just being locked up, but being driven fucking –”

“Crazy? Do you feel you’re being driven crazy?”

Castle sighed. “No. Sometimes I feel scared shitless, sometimes I can’t sleep, but I’m not worried about the yellow wallpaper yet.”

“Then perhaps you should think about what I’m saying. A man’s sins can plague him, Castle. Perhaps they can plague others. It was one thing when you only abused your body with drugs, and treated women like chewing gum, to be savored with little attention and then discarded. But murder!”

“Ease up there, Rom. Katrine didn’t even know about the downbelow before yesterday.”

“Do you love her?” the Cardinal asked.

“Jesus! She’s a call girl. I hardly know her, outside her ticklish bits.”

“Then send her away, Castle. That isn’t the kind of energy you need right now. Have you talked to Jonathan? If nothing else, couldn’t he arrange for you to — move to a different house?”

Castle sighed. “I don’t know. I haven’t. I talked to Teddy a bit, you know.”

Katrine came back into the room munching on a raw purple potato. Both the men looked at her, and she shrugged. “What? I like raw potatoes.” It crunched like a dense apple when she took a bit, and she sat back down, pulling her chair away from the table a little, and eyed her coffee. “It’s not like I’m dunkin’ it. But I could, if it would freak you out.”

“God,” Castle said, “don’t talk about freakouts.”

Romaglio looked confused, then blank, then disturbed, and Katrine shuddered. “I know, right? Jesus, the poor guy. What’s his name again?”

“Pasmore,” Romaglio said. “Lamont Pasmore. I’m sure he’ll be fine. He has spent too long with books, assembling his theology of minor miracles. Encountering the unreal in the flesh, as it were — it was beyond his envelope, I think you say.”

“Didn’t think there was such a thing as a minor miracle,” Katrine said.

Romaglio smiled. “You have never sampled the meat that never spoils or the soup that seasons itself — or written with the pen that never runs out of ink. Perpetual usefulness, as I think the phrase would translate into English, is a wonderful thing — but rarely considered on the scale of moving mountains or raising the dead.”

“I feel bad about it, though,” Castle said. “If I hadn’t called you — I mean, Rommy, you’re not even an exorcist, you’re all about apparitions, prophecies … don’t you work for whatchacall, the saint-makers most of the time?”

Romaglio snorted. “I frequently investigate claims of miracles credited to individuals considered for canonization, yes.”

“Hey,” Katrine said, “Like A Canticle For Leibowitz!”

“Mmhmm,” Romaglio said. “But in any case — Castle, I had to come, I was worried about you. And Pas insisted on accompanying me — out of concern for me in part, but also I think out of great curiosity. The impulse which leads one to study God’s miracles is not so dissimilar from that which leads one to staunch the flow of supernatural evil into the world, children. Or as I have heard it put before: no one ever says, ‘when I grow up, I want to organize data for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.’ Everyone wants to be Fox Mulder.”

“And you’re sure he’ll be okay?” Castle insisted.

“Yes. Castle, even fruitless exorcisms often lead to episodes like Pas’s — with far less apparent cause. The stress of anticipation, perhaps — fear is a deadly thing. His hands will heal of their own accord, and in the meantime he’ll be cared for by nuns expert in psychological and supernatural trauma. I promise you that he’ll be back on the job, nose in the books, within a few short months.”

“Months,” Katrine murmured. “Jesus Christ. Uh, sorry Father, I mean holy shit.”

“Yes,” Romaglio said, “I’m sure God appreciates your apotheosizing excrement rather than use His son’s name.”

There was a long silence Castle finally broke with, “You know, breakfast seems to have worked.”

“Yeah,” Katrine said. “I don’t feel hungover anymore. Not even tired.”

Romaglio smiled slightly. “Perhaps since you see my wisdom in that matter you will see it in others?”

Castle rolled his eyes, and Katrine asked, “What do you mean?”

When Romaglio didn’t answer, Castle said, “Rommy wants me to ’send you away.’”

“Meaning no offense of course,” Romaglio said. “But Castle has been through troubled times this last year. I cannot help but think he may have — brought the current situation upon himself, perhaps. Or at least exasperated it.”

“And, what, fucking a call girl makes it worse because it’s sinful?” Katrine asked neutrally.

“Yes.”

“All the same to me. I don’t want to stand between anyone and his redemption.” But it was clear from her tone she thought the whole idea was bullshit. “It’s just a job, after all.”

“It’s fucking ridiculous,” Castle said. “Rommy, you know damn well you don’t keep to your vow of celibacy, and you’re a damn priest.”

“There’s a difference,” Romaglio said, “between ignoring that archaic and long-ignored vow, and sex without love. I am monogamous, and so is my mistress. I no longer treat sex as sport, although I did when I was much younger.”

“Yeah, and the coke?”

Rommy shrugged. “I barely touch it. Only when my American and Australian friends visit.”

“All right,” Katrine said, “why don’t we put all that kind of stuff aside, cause like, don’t we still need to figure out what Castle’s gonna do about the whole, you know, spooky thing? The exorcism didn’t work, so what’s that mean?”

“It means,” Romaglio said, “that there are no demons at work. Were it anyone but Baroni, I could fault the exorcist: but not here. He is supreme among his order. It cost me a great deal of face and favor to bring him here.”

“Yeah,” Castle said. “Sorry about that.”

Romaglio shrugged a little. “You paid well for it. It was my choice to let you.”

“So,” Katrine pursued, “what next? Ghostbusters?”

“Turns out they hate it when you call them that or even talk about the movie,” Castle said. “But yeah. McCall seems like he’s got his shit together. We’ll see what he comes up with, what he suggests.” Romaglio snorted, and Castle whirled on him. “What? You got a better idea, padre? Because your boys didn’t seem to manage much.”

“Prayer,” Romaglio said shortly, “Prayer and penance.”

“Fuck you.”

“Castle –”

“No.” He stood up. “Fuck you, Rommy. Maybe it’s your job to be high and mighty, but I don’t need it. Whatever I’ve done, I don’t deserve this. Being a … a bad person, doesn’t fucking make your house haunted, or whatever the hell’s going on. Take your smugness and your advice and shove it.”

Romaglio got up stoically and nodded. “I believe it is time for me to catch my plane. Katrine.” He nodded to her. “It was good to meet you. I wish you would pursue another manner of employment.”

No one said anything as he collected his bags and left. Castle sat back down and didn’t move from his chair, and Katrine just studied her nails awkwardly, after giving the old priest a platonic hug at the door.

#

“What’s the French for fiddle-de-dee?” Katrine asked.

“What?” Castle turned from the TV, where he’d been staring sightlessly at some kind of celebrity reality game show marathon, to her.

“It’s just something my family says to fill the silences,” she said. “Especially when things are awkward.”

“Oh,” he said, and went back to the television. A few minutes later, he added, “You can blow me if you want.”

She wrinkled up her face for a moment and then sank to her knees wordlessly and expressionlessly.

He sighed and waved a hand. “Nevermind. I just thought you were bored.”

“So I should suck you off because I’m bored?”

“Well, you’re a call girl.”

“Yeah. And I’m here for free yesterday and today, remember?”

“Right,” he said. “Okay. I can pay you if you want, though.”

She punched him. Hard, in the arm. Took the remote from him and clicked the TV off. “Listen,” she said. “You’re being an asshole. I’m off the clock right now, so you’re not allowed to be an asshole, and I don’t always put up with it even when money is on the nightstand. Apologize.”

“Sorry,” he said tonelessly.

“Stop being an obnoxious, wounded little shit, and apologize.” She was angry. Really angry, redheaded angry, he could see it in her eyes. It woke him up a little, and he nodded.

“Yeah. Okay. I’m sorry. Seriously.” He straightened up. “Seriously, you’re right, I’m being a dick. I don’t know why. I feel — off. Empty. Grumpy, but more than grumpy. Look, you can go home if you want, this must suck for you and the exciting part’s been over since yesterday. Not that it was all that exciting to begin with.”

She shook her head. “No. You want to make it up to me?” He moved to spread her legs and get between them, and she shook her head. “Not like that. Tell me stuff. You’ve been not telling me stuff. Tell me stuff.”

“Like what?”

She rolled her eyes. “Work your way up to it. The tattoo first, what’s up with that? I told you about mine — it’s the symbol of the Morrigan, which is both badass and sexy — but I don’t have a clue about yours, which is pretty fucking elaborate. I mentioned it the first night I came over, but you were distracted by my pussy.”

He grinned. “Yeah I was.” He rolled up his sleeve and looked at it. It was funny, about tattoos. Keep them long enough and you forget they’re there. Whenever someone asked about it, he took a real look at it, saw it again as more than a splash of color that had become his skin, as invisible and transparent as a birthmark or mole. The whole thing was about four inches high plus the writing below it. A mountain, high and peaky and reminiscent of Japanese paintings — he didn’t know enough about art to know if there was any actual relationship there. A stairway led up the mountain, winding back and forth as it went, like that logo in Joe Versus The Volcano, and seven shooting stars surrounded it. “‘When the stars threw down their spears,’” he said, reading from the simple serif text beneath the picture. “It’s from Blake’s ‘Tyger Tyger’ poem. Both the line and the picture — he did paintings to go along with it.”

“I didn’t know he was a painter too,” she said, and then added, “‘Tyger Tyger burning bright …’” She shook her head. “That’s all I remember. I was a theater major, not poetry.”

He widened his eyes. “I didn’t even know you’d gone to college.”

That didn’t seem to merit a response, so she just asked, “Tell me about the poem. Why’s it on your arm?”

“The poem’s about the dark side of the soul,” he said, thinking about it. “The hot part. The burning part. The part God didn’t make. The part he imagined and left aside, until Lucifer brought it into being. The poem’s about asking if the Lamb and the Tyger have the same maker, and implying they don’t. And that line? The stars are the fallen angels.” He paused. “Anyway, the thing of it is that I own the painting. Getting the tattoo, I guess it was a way of showing that off. The original — there have never been any prints made of it, because it wasn’t part of the version of Tyger that Blake published. My grandfather bought it when I was born.”

“No shit?” she asked. “That’s got to be worth — a lot. What, is it back at the estate?”

He shook his head. “It’s upstairs. I haven’t unpacked it yet, I was waiting to pick a bedroom, and I haven’t really got around to that yet.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It has been kind of musical beds.”

“You want to see it?”

“I do, but first — why didn’t you tell me about the ‘downbelow’?”

He sighed. “That kinda pissed you off, huh.”

“Not pissed me off, just surprised me. It seems like a big part of what’s gone on. I mean, your face is still splotchy looking from the pounding you said you took.”

“Yeah.” So he told her about that, and about animal control discovering the hidden door, and that he’d found the music box there. “It’s just, I met you in the middle of that going on, finding out about it. And then it was like –”

“It seemed like something that was supposed to be a secret.”

“Right.”

She frowned and shook her head. “Well,” she said, not sounding very enthusiastic, “you can show me the painting if you want.”

#

He’d moved all of the boxes from the room where he’d put his stuff, and still couldn’t see the carton the painting had been in. “I know it was here,” he said. “It was here last time I came in to get some clothes to unpack, that was like — a week ago or something.”

“You’re sure it was in this room? You’ve got a lot of rooms. A lot of storage rooms.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but this is the only one that’s my stuff, not the Van Der Lindens’.” They exchanged a look. “Okay, we’ll check the other storerooms on this floor.”

There were plenty of paintings and other framed items in the other storerooms — including a Van Gogh, if he didn’t miss his guess, and several early Dali sketches — but no Blake. Not even anything of the same size: Blake’s painting was fairly small, compared to the others, seemingly done for his own enjoyment as much as anything else, but the package it was in was state of the art and environmentally controlled, easy to spot. And nowhere to be seen.

“Goddammit,” Castle said. “You know who took it.”

“What?” Katrine looked puzzled. “Who?”

“Pasmore. Before he freaked out. I’ll bet he was already starting to lose it.”

“So he steals a painting? When would he even have a chance?”

Castle frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know. Shit. Did he stay with us the whole time? I don’t remember …”

“I wasn’t paying attention, I guess.”

Castle sighed. McCall had specifically told him to report any objects being moved, things missing, run of the mill poltergeist shit like that, so he flipped open his cell and punched the ghostbreaker’s number.

“All right,” McCall said after he’d jotted down the basics and noted what Castle knew about the painting. “Anything else?”

“No.”

“Have fun at the exorcism?”

“Nothing came of it. You have any information for me yet?”

“Yeah. A little. Ricky sent me some of what he had on the Van Der Lindens, the public records stuff. Most of it’s scattered here and there, waiting to be drawn together, but I got some basics jotted down right here, you want me to read em to you?”

“Long as we’re on the phone, shoot.”

A rustle of papers and, “Michael Van Der Linden,” McCall said. “Born November 2, 1894, in Boston, Massachusetts. Died June 22, 1975, at home, of natural causes. Wife Samantha Montgomery Van Der Linden, died a few months before him; two children, Clarissa Patricia, later Patricia Nicholls — that’s the Patricia Nicholls who inherited Domino in the name of the Trimalchio Trust — and Michael Berlin.”

“Okay,” Castle said, “Wait. His wife wasn’t named Mia? What about the servants? Look into the servants, maybe there’s a maid named Mia.”

“Maybe there is,” McCall said, “but in the meantime, I found a Mia. She’s just not his wife. She’s his sister.”

“What?”

“Mia Emily Van Der Linden, born April 5, 1902 — died July 15, 1925. Both in Boston.”

“Wait a minute,” Castle said, holding a finger up to Katrine before jogging downstairs. “Hang on a sec, let me check something.” He waved the mouse around on one of the computers and brought up the info Reynolds had given him. “She died after he moved into Domino? Did she ever live here?”

“She died before he even moved in, as far as I can tell. That whole other side of the house, the ‘reflected’ part, he built that. The house was under reconstruction until late July of ‘25. He moved in right after the funeral, it looks like.”

Castle frowned. He’d been more than half-assuming that if there was any kind of ‘ghost’ haunting Domino, any kind of residue, it was Mia’s. “Read me the original documents,” he said. “You’ve got, what, marriage licenses and so on there?”

“Yeah. I haven’t filed them yet, but — you want me to just read em as I found em?”

“Go for it.”

So he read through what he had, bit by bit: the marriage license from what must have been right after his discharge from the Army, death certificates, birth certificates, deeds, the works. Mia had died in a fire that also took the Van Der Linden parents, whom she still lived with; she was survived by Michael and her fiancee. “Here we go,” McCall said, “Here’s the marriage announcement from the Ecklesburg Herald –”

“Ecklesburg?”

“Yeah, Ecklesburg, Alabama, why?”

Suddenly Castle remembered who Samantha Montgomery was. The young girl Michael had written to Mia about, teasing her. “Later. Go on, read it.”

“‘In the absence of his son, Captain James Montgomery, who continues in his service abroad, His Honor Judge Augustus Montgomery is proud to announce the marriage of his granddaughter Samantha Clarissa Montgomery (pictured at left) to Michael Paul Van Der Linden, of the Boston Van Der Lindens, son of Karel and Grace (nee Mickelson) Van Der Linden. Cousins of European nobility, the Van Der Lindens have owned and operated a cross-continental trading company since the early days of colonization, in addition to other business interests — such as the paper mill which has just begun construction in Ecklesburg! Michael and Samantha are expected to take up residence in one of the family’s New England homes.”

“Christ Almighty,” Castle said. “They built a mill so he could marry a little girl?”

“A little more than that, I think,” McCall said. “They were married in January of 1919: Clarissa Patricia was born in June.”

“Aha,” Castle said. “He got the kid pregnant.”

“Sounds like it. What a lovely marriage that must have been.”

“Well, they stayed together for over fifty years, it sounds like, until they both died. Guess it worked out.”

“Guess so. Want me to tell Ricky to double up on Mia’s story?”

“Damn right. Near as I can tell right now, Michael — who I’m betting was fucking his little sister before he joined the Army — kept both sides of their correspondence after she died. But that was over 80 years ago, and it sounds like all Mia ever did with Domino was visit.”

“If that.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I’ll get him on it. Call me if anything comes up. How’s the face?”

“Swelling’s down. It’s mostly just yellowed now.”

“Glad to hear it. Take it easy.”

The minute Castle flipped the phone shut, he heard Katrine yelling for him. Not panicked “help the monster’s gonna get me” yelling, not exactly — but there was an edge to it, even beyond the strain from yelling so loudly. And it was coming from downstairs. She must’ve wandered back down there while he was on the phone, engrossed in the Van Der Linden saga, but dammit, he should have told her not to go down there alone. She should have known better.

He grabbed what he half-thought of as his ghostbusting pack — a small duffel bag with two Maglites, a digital camera, and a loaded pistol sitting on an empty chamber — and ran down the corridor to the gatehouse and down to the downbelow.

Katrine had already turned the lights on, and he found her standing outside Mia’s room, standing in a weird position with one leg cocked like she’d been in mid-step, and a hand on the side of the doorway — like she’d been startled and just froze in place.

“CAAAAASTLE!” she yelled again, and he jumped.

“Jesus, I’m right here!”

She whirled around and almost fell over. “Fuck. You better call McCall. And maybe your uncle too. And maybe the fucking cops.”

He pushed her aside and looked in the room, where the bedside lamp was lit, shining light on his Blake painting, hanging over the bed. It had been mutilated — as had the wall it hung on. Both of them had been scrawled over, as if fingerpainted, with the lines from Blake’s poem. The writing — large, blocky, all capitals with larger capitals at the start of lines — ran right over the painting without pausing.

Tyger Tyger. burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes!

On what wings dare he aspire!

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The writing was red and rusty, even moreso in the incandescent light, and still wet, and it was clear what well the ink had come from. Castle’s gut churned when he realized he recognized the smell of it, the rich throat-clogging smell, even before he thought the word or saw its source: a body, twisted completely backwards at the waist, sides literally split from the force of it and covered in ragged, fraying tears like the seams of an overcooked burrito. The tongue had turned black and lolled out of its mouth, the head facing them upside-down. The fingers were covered in ruddy stains: one hand was still clutched against the torn wounds like it’d been dipping in for more, to write more, say more.

“That’s him, isn’t it,” Katrine said dully, and there was neither pity nor surprise in her voice.

“Yeah,” Castle said. “Lamont Pasmore.”

“You don’t have to stay,” Castle said.

Katrine rolled her eyes at him as he cleared the table of the lunch dishes. She’d stayed the night after McCall interviewed her — privately, after a firm request to Castle. “Please,” she said. “How often does anyone get the opportunity to see an exorcism? Have you ever seen one?”

“Only on cable.”

“There you go, and you’re richer than cake. Sunshine like that’s never going to shine on a poor little matchgirl like me, so I have to take it when I find it.”

“Whatever turns you on,” he said. “I can’t promise it’ll be fun.”

She lit a cigarette and followed him into the kitchen, sliding a hand down his pant leg as he filled the dishwasher, and blowing smoke past his ear. “We’ll manage fun somehow.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Try to behave around the priests who are coming to fight the devil, all right?”

“Got it,” she said. “No blowjobs in front of the priests unless they say it’s okay.”

As if on cue, the doorbell chimed, and Castle felt a thrill shiver through him. He didn’t expect the exorcism to work, exactly — he was pretty sure he didn’t believe in any of the things that would have to exist in order to provide it with targets. But this was old-school Catholicism lurking at the door. Black-robed, incense-churning Catholicism, Inquisition Catholicism, doing the fire-and-brimstone thing better than Protestants ever could. Fuck the Puritans, fuck televangelists, no one put forth the fear of God like the exorcist. Mean motherfucking servant of God.

#

Romaglio was the first the door, with four men to his sides — none of them had priestly collars visible, which Castle supposed he’d be grateful for if he cared what the neighbors thought. He didn’t recognize them, beyond the broad basics of person-classification he’d picked up through nature, nurture, whatever reigned at the moment: they were all of them old, the youngest on the whiskers end of 60, and he’d peg that one as an American — one of two, along with the graying redhead in the back who might well have been Boston Irish. The rest had to be Italian, though, especially the short man next to Rommy, the one whose face was creased like he’d spent a year pissed off. Might well have, too: he looked old enough to have been around when Vatican II kicked in. That one had to be a Cardinal or a Bishop.

“Sebastian Castle?” the pissed-off-looking Italian asked. “We are come from Rome.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s actually Sebastian Castle Finch. Castle’s my middle name. But sure, yeah, come on in. Ciao, Rommy.”

Pissed-Off snorted as he led the priests in when Castle stepped aside, and once the door was closed, Romaglio introduced everyone. “Castle,” he said, gesturing to Pissed-Off. “This is Giacomo Cardinal Baroni, and his associates, Padre Piero Strabo and Father Philip Ramsey.” An elderly Italian man and the redhead, respectively. “And my own assistant in this matter, Father Lamont Pasmore.” The younger one, the other American.

Castle shook hands with the two who’d bother — Pasmore and Strabo — and nodded to the others, before giving Romaglio a brief hug. “Can I get anyone anything? Coffee — espresso — a bite to eat? I don’t know if you just got off the plane, or –”

“We will perform the rites,” Baroni pronounced officiously. He didn’t sound a bit like a mean motherfucking servant of God, more like one of those high school teachers who hated teenagers and you wondered why they took their job, but Castle supposed God didn’t recruit the same way the Marines did. Baroni peered over horn-rimmed glasses at Katrine, who’d peeked her head into the foyer from the living room. “Is this one living, or an apparition?” he asked.

“Uh, living,” Castle said. “That’s Katrine. She’s a friend of mine.”

“We will begin in the house’s basements,” Baroni said. When he spoke, he had a tendency to look away from people: it didn’t seem to be out of self-consciousness but rather because he expected them to be looking at him. This was a man who was used to commanding attention — used to commanding, period. “If the visitors become a burden to us, they will adjourn. Come, padres.”

“Ha,” Katrine said. “Compadres.” Everyone stared at her for a moment, except Baroni, who held his hands in front of him waiting for the others. “Um, hi,” she said. “I’m a call girl.”

“Wonderful,” Baroni said, and whipped a finger forward gesturing, Castle assumed, to be led downstairs. “Then you will know to come when we call, and not before.”

#

Katrine followed nonetheless, and no one said anything — except her, gasping a little when they entered the downbelow Castle had never told her about. He’d explain later, he guessed.

Romaglio gave Castle a glance that was hard to read. “Cardinal Baroni and the others would like to return to Rome as soon as possible,” he said as they descended the stairs. “But my flight back isn’t until tomorrow. We’ll have time to socialize if you like.”

“Yeah,” Castle said. “That would be good.”

When they reached the third floor, Baroni nodded. “This is as far down as the house goes, yes?”

“Yeah,” Castle said. “Unless there’s yet another hidden door or something.”

Baroni looked around as if searching for one, and then gestured to his vice-exorcists, or whatever they were. “We’ll start here. Work our way up if necessary. Piero, Philip, prepare. I shall pray for guidance.” He knelt immediately, exactly where he was, and began murmuring to himself.

The vice-exorcists headed back upstairs, Ramsey clapping a hand on Castle’s shoulder as he passed by, as if in sympathy.

“So,” Katrine said in an undertone to Pasmore and Romaglio, “What should I expect?”

“Likely nothing,” Pasmore said. “The Church recognizes the existence of Satan, and of demons who are capable of influencing events on Earth in his name. But he has no physical form, no physical presence: no odor, no sound, no voice, nothing to touch or see. Most exorcisms are performed on possessed individuals.”

Rommy snorted, and when Castle nudged him, he shook his head. “He’s right, but it’s only in the last few years that the rite of exorcism has been seen that way. It was changed in 1999, the last of the old liturgies to be revised following Vatican II. Before that, the presence of Satan in the world was a more respected tenet of the faith. But now — technically, Castle, we should not be here. We should not be performing this thing.”

“I know, I know, I told you I appreciate you pulling strings to bump me up the list –”

“It is not that. It is simply that one does not perform an exorcism on a house. A house has no soul to be tempted and corrupted: people do.” He looked hesitant. “I have recommended we exorcise you as well.”

Visions of Inquisitors with red-hot pokers and Catherine wheels flashed through his mind. “Um, no.”

“It is just like prayer, Castle. If you aren’t possessed, it cannot harm you. If you are, it can only help.”

“Okay, wait,” Katrine said. “What’s the point in doing this if you don’t think anything’s going to happen? If exorcisms can’t be done on a house?”

Baroni stood up, and for a moment looked imposing even though he had to look up at Katrine. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, and so on. The Church does not like to speak of it, but there are evils in the world which do not function as we expect them to. They are not outside our domain: Christ rules over all if we but know what to ask for and are meant to have His intercession. But the manner of their working is not known to us.”

Pasmore sighed, and Romaglio held up a liver-spotted hand. The old man had gotten older since being incardinated. “Now isn’t the time to rehash internal professional arguments. I’m sure everyone will agree that the bottom line is twofold: sometimes an exorcism works when we think it shouldn’t, and sometimes it doesn’t work when we think it should.”

“Yes,” Baroni said, although he seemed to say it with something like a sneer. “We minimize the ‘false negatives,’ as it were, by carefully screening those permitted to perform the rite.”

“And we sequester the false positives,” Pasmore added, with much more of a sneer — or maybe it was just more audible to Castle’s ear, with its Southie swagger, “by keeping we priests assigned to them away well out of the public eye.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Lamont,” Ramsey said as he and Strabo returned, bearing large, heavy-looking duffel bags. “I heard there’s a gas station down in Falmouth where the coffee machine bleeds the blood of Christ. I’m sure you can score a few inches of news coverage there.”

For a moment, Pasmore looked like he was going to sock the other priest, and then he relaxed and shrugged. “Rom’s right, there’s no need to get into it now.” He bowed slightly to Baroni. “I apologize, Your Eminence, if I sounded like I was trying to pick a fight.”

“Prattle, prattle, roil and rattle,” Baroni mumbled. “If I wanted a fight, you would have one. If I didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to pick one. Your apology is as unnecessary as it is falsely-assumed. If you want to be useful, help me into my vestments.”

Strabo took a dry-cleaning bag out of one of the duffels, which Ramsey unzipped to reveal a white, gold-trimmed robe thing that reminded Castle of what the priests wore during Mass. Everyone was quiet as Pasmore helped Baroni — whose arms were visibly frail, and shook when he held them out from his body, one of them crooked as though he wasn’t able to straighten it entirely — don first the robe and then a long purple stole. The thing had a feeling of ritual to it, like when Rambo put his red bandana on — but Castle thought maybe he just wanted it to feel that way.

“How well do you remember your Latin?” Romaglio asked quietly.

“Mostly the dirty stuff,” Castle said.

“Then I’ll translate anything that isn’t obvious.” He shifted a little, so he was half-looking at Katrine as well, including her. “From here on out, everything Cardinal Baroni says will be in Latin, save for the few Hebrew phrases he prefers.”

Baroni made the sign of the cross, intoning in a voice that was probably booming when it was young, and still had a well-worn rhythm to it, “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” and held his right hand out in front of him, facing the stairs. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti!” Ramsey and Strabo repeated it, at Baroni’s sides while Pasmore followed behind them, and Rommy brought up the rear with Castle and Katrine, who looked around like she was expecting pea-soup or a burst of blood from the floor.

“Veni, Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium, et tui amoris in eis accende. Emitte Spiritum tuum et creabuntur,” Baroni said, taking slow and deliberate steps as he walked towards the second floor, and the other priests responded with, “Et renovabis faciem terrae.”

“Oremus.”

“Deus, qui corda fidelium Sancti Spiritus illustratione docuisti. Da nobis in eodem Spiritu recta sapere, et de eius semper consolatione gaudere. Per Christum Dominum nostrum.”

“They’re invoking the Holy Spirit,” Romaglio whispered.

They reached the top of the stairs, and Baroni repeated the invocation and the sign of the cross, before adding, “Ab omni hoste visibili et invisibili et ubíque in hoc sáeculo liberetur!”

“From every enemy both visible and invisible and everywhere in this lifetime be freed,” Romaglio whispered. “Saint Eric expelled one thousand demons in the form of hot coals from a man with that single command.”

No hot coals came.

They stood in the central room of the second floor of the downbelow, and prayed the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, all seven of them: “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo.”

Strabo opened a thick leatherbound Bible — the first Castle could remember seeing that had thick pages, like a premium limited-edition hardcover, instead of those paper-thin ones — as Ramsey lit a censer of incense and began to swing it lightly in front of him, just enough to disperse the smoke, which preceded them as they walked through the house, every room, even the bathrooms. Strabo read passages from the Bible chosen seemingly at random, and Baroni continued his intonation of Latin prayers, occasionally pressing his palm flat against the walls.

They eventually reached the third floor, and nothing had happened. No protests of demonic voices, no signs of change, nothing but sickly-sweet incense getting in the curtains and upholstery — God, just how many of his mother’s genes had he inherited? — and a lot of the Church Latin he’d learned coming back to him. Katrine wasn’t the only one who seemed disappointed: although Romaglio only looked tense, and Baroni perfectly inscrutable, the other priests seemed simultaneously let down and on edge.

“I’m getting a real other-shoe-dropping vibe,” Katrine said, and immediately blushed like she wished she hadn’t said anything.

Baroni actually nodded, though. “Yes. Something is not well here. I believe you were right about that, Mr Finch, even if we can find no sign of it right now.”

“Well, I’m glad you don’t think I’m crazy at least,” Castle said, but he was perturbed by all the build-up and felt like a silly shit.

“No, no, not crazy. I am sometimes unsure there is such a thing.” Baroni waved a bony finger in a small circle, and Strabo and Ramsey came to Castle’s sides — not grabbing him, but like they were ready to. “Mr Finch, we must entertain the possibility that it is you who are possessed. Please do not be worried about Padres Strabo and Ramsey: a possessed man, when his demon is about to be expelled from him, sometimes thrashes or becomes otherwise violent. We are protecting you, and not only you.”

With that, the priests grabbed him strongly — for their age — by the shoulders, but were only restraining him, not trying to hurt him. It still kicked up a little panic in his gut when they forced him against the wall to leverage the restraint, no less so when Baroni made the sign of the cross and smacked his palm down on Castle’s forehead. Romaglio and Pasmore stood behind him, as silent as broken stones.

“Pater noster,” the Cardinal said, “qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Ecce calix voluptatis carnis qui laetitiam vitae donat. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Placeat tibi, obsequium servitutis meae, et praesta, ut sacrificium quod oculis tuae maiestatis indignus obtuli, tibi sit acceptabile! Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo.”

Romaglio dabbed holy water on his forehead, around Baroni’s fingers, and it went on like that for the better part of an hour — long enough for Castle’s feet to get sore. At first he stood perfectly rigid, sweat trickling down behind his ear and rolling down his neck and shirt. He didn’t believe in possession, he didn’t think — not in demons, or any of that Roger Corman crap. But he believed he’d gotten the shit kicked out of his face by something he couldn’t see or feel, and somehow he’d always suspected the little girl was the real cause of everything in Poltergeist, Indian graveyard or no Indian graveyard. Maybe this was all his fault. Maybe he was some kind of psychic timebomb and everything was leaking out of his head.

But that tension and half-formed fear eased, as he watched it ease out of Katrine as well. He wasn’t shaking and convulsing. He wasn’t spitting pea soup or spinning his head around. He let it go on, because he had no idea what he was supposed to be doing — maybe it was something that took a few hours.

Finally, Rommy asked, “How’re you feeling, Castle?”

“Fine,” he said right away. “Kind of hungry.”

The priests sighed collectively.

“Something is in this house,” Baroni said again. “We will begin again from the downbelow: perhaps the departure of the clerk will help. If not, I must ask the woman to leave.”

“Hey,” Katrine said, and Rommy shook his head.

“It’s nothing personal, miss,” he told her. “But you don’t live here and you aren’t performing the rite. Most of what Castle told me about, and all of the most striking occurrences, happened while you were out of the house. It is possible you are somehow interfering without wishing to.” He paused, and glanced sidelong at Baroni. “Cardinal, the music box I mentioned.”

“Yes?” Baroni cocked his head to the side, like a cat listening at a can opener in another room. “Enzio, you have good instincts. It is a shame they are so wasted with such trivial things. Fetch me this music box.”

They fetched it together, as it were, rather than everyone running up and down the stairs, and everyone sat around the living room as Strabo examined the box.

“Padre Strabo is our technical expert,” Baroni noted with a weird tone of pride. “If there are mechanical oddities to the contraption, he will note them accordingly.”

“It’s of good make,” Strabo said after a moment. “Not mass-produced. Perhaps a century old, a little more, a little less, hard to be exact without opening it up. Well cared for, or it would have rusted. Mr Finch, you say the mention of ‘her mouth’ came when the box unwound itself?”

“Well — the crank was moving backwards, yeah.”

“Let us see what happens when we play it as such things are meant to be played, then.”

He held the clown-headed circus tent in his lap, holding it down with one hand, fingers splayed, as he turned the crank with the other. Music started almost immediately, creakily, sounding familiar but warped: calliope music was like that, and it’d always kind of pissed Castle off, having to sit there listening for a few seconds to something he knew he recognized, only to figure out it was a crappy carnied-out version of “Addicted to Love” or “Up Where We Belong.”

This one sounded kind of Big Band-ish, Dixieland-ish, and they all sat there listening, ears cocked, as Strabo played the box, until Pasmore suddenly blurted out, “In the winter — in the summer — ain’t we got fun?” Everyone looked at him, and he twitched his fingers in a c’mon-c’mon gesture. “Times are bum — and getting bummer — still we got fun. There’s nothing surer — the rich get rich and the poor get — children! In the mean time — in between time — ain’t we got fun?”

Now the tune’s familiarity fell into place, and Castle could feel a tension leave the room.

“Okay,” Strabo said. “That helps us date it a little better — that song’s from the 1920s, isn’t it? Now let’s play it backwards.”

Castle hissed a breath involuntarily and leaned forward to listen as Strabo forced the crank backwards. That clown’s face had an open mouth, too wide, like a cartoon: no teeth, just lips and tongue and big black gap. “Backwards now,” it said, in a singsong but insistent voice, wavering like a warped record. “Backwards now, backwards now, play now, tease better play.”

Baroni coughed. “Padre Strabo?”

Strabo frowned. “It seems to have a recording mechanism of some sort, perhaps. That would have been immensely expensive and intricately involved a century ago, but not out of the question. That did not sound like my voice, did it?” Everyone shook their heads. “There is some sort of distortion, then, which is to be expected and could account for the rearrangement of the words.”

He paused, lifted the box, and put it down on the table — and the crank, as if jostled awake by being moved, began to clank backwards again, the gears audible, sounding like measuring tape. “Welcome to the circus, Sebastian,” the voice said this time, sounding sneering, sounding female. “Welcome to the circus. Welcome to the downbelow.”

Castle leaned forward and vomited on the rug, a sudden mouthful of salt and cloudy saliva that left his tongue coated with bile and seemed to drip from the roof of his mouth like condensation. “Ugh,” he said, as Baroni considered him dispassionately and Katrine jog-stepped to the kitchen. “I’m sorry. I just –”

“Sure,” Pasmore said. “We all heard it. Don’t worry.”

“Curious,” Strabo said. “And I doubt very much a mechanical explanation. Your Eminence?”

Baroni reached for the music box and placed his palm against it. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” he said, with a determined look on his face. “Veni, Spiritus. Emitte Spiritum tuum et creabuntur. Ab omni hoste visibili et invisibili et ubíque in hoc sáeculo liberetur.”

As he’d done with Castle, Baroni kept at his exorcism of the music box for an hour to no apparent effect. He finally leaned back and exhaled a sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers as he closed his eyes. “Very well. We adjourn to the downbelow, then.”

Castle called both Katrine and Charity while McCall did his walk-through of the house, a preliminary “casing of the joint” just to eyeball things and get his bearings. Katrine agreed to come the next day, and sounded excited about it and the whole prospect of ghost-hunting; Charity was a harder nut to crack.

“Mr Boyd,” she said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t meet clients. I only work on the phone. If you want to purchase some photos or used clothing items, we could arrange that, but –”

“Okay,” he said. “Look. I guess it wouldn’t have to be in person. I just need you to talk to this guy for me. I was on the phone last week, I thought it was with you — it turned out it wasn’t. We didn’t talk last week, right?”

“Not that I recall.” She was getting progressively cooler.

“Okay, so he just needs to ask you some questions. It’s — it might be a blackmail situation. We aren’t sure. I spoke to someone who claimed to be you. That doesn’t concern you at all?”

“Should it?” she asked. “It’s a little weird, but I can’t see making a big thing out of it. Look, I don’t like getting a lot of this kind of attention. I’ve had people ask to ‘interview’ me before — usually for divorce cases, you know, testify that the husband was getting off, or the kinds of fantasies he had, things he said about his wife, whatever. That kind of thing isn’t confidential, you know. It’s not like I’m your priest or your lawyer.”

“Sure,” he said, “but that’s not what this is about.”

“I just don’t like doing it. I’ve got a pretty simple job. I like to keep it that way.”

“I understand, but this would really help out –” Castle made a helpless gesture at McCall as he returned.

“Katrine or Charity?” McCall mouthed at him, and Castle held up two fingers. McCall took the phone from him. “Ma’am,” he said, in a suddenly twangy lower Atlantic accent. “This is Deputy Marshal Wayne Clintock, I’m going to have to ask for your assistance in some matters pertaining to the issue already communicated to you? I can subpoena your work record if I have to, but I don’t think either of us needs that kind of bother.”

He paused, nodding along. “That’s right. Well then, let me give you my Massachusetts FAX number, you can send a copy to me there, off the record, as a cooperative witness in this investigation. Right, ma’am. Now the time in question is, we’re gonna need to know about that last Wednesday there, when I understand Mr Boyd says he spoke to someone using your usual modus operandi of what we might call ‘narrating.’ What’s that? Uh-huh … no, the way he described it to me was, he’d be observing a girl, and you’d narrate along with what he was seeing, like explaining a story? Uh-huh. I see. Well you get that information to me, then, for every call you’ve had from this number. Can you do that for me? Thank you, and have a nice day there.”

McCall clicked the phone shut, tossed it to Castle, and picked up the mug of coffee Castle’d poured for him. “Says it was just the one time, the first time you told me about. A shower thing?”

“Yeah,” Castle said. “Yeah, the girl next door was in the shower.”

“Both times, you were watching the neighbor girl.”

“Yeah, the second time was pretty much because of the first time, if you see what I mean. What was with that accent, anyway?”

“A lot of phone sex operators have ties one way or the other to the drug trade — usually a boyfriend who’s dealing on the side, so she does the work to fill in the blanks, so to speak. It’s the kind of job you can work five hours one week, eighty the next, and the kind they can do when their boy’s out of town, keep a nest egg on the side. They’re skittish about cops — federal cops in particular. And nothing says federal cop better than a Virginia accent. It’s as good as a badge.”

Castle eyed him. “Is that true?”

“No idea. But it worked. Maybe she just needed a good excuse to cooperate, so she wouldn’t lose face. Anything funny happen during the first call?”

Castle frowned. “Sort of. Maybe. It wasn’t like the second — Charity didn’t seem to be making things happen. But the girl, at the end, when I was — you know –”

“Yeah.”

“– she seemed to be looking at me, and she was singing. ‘I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t care.’”

McCall nodded. “You’ve mentioned that line before.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have internet here?”

Castle nodded, “Wireless broadband. Is it a quote from something?”

“It sounds familiar.” McCall nodded his head over to one of Castle’s computers, and Castle nodded. “Doesn’t sound familiar to you?”

“It does now, but you know, I’ve heard it a few times. Before that — I’m not sure. It’s plain enough, it’s not like ‘remember the Maine’ or ‘headless body found in topless bar’ or something.”

McCall sat down at the computer, opened the browser, and rattled a few keystrokes here and there with secretarial efficiency and rhythm, opening up multiple tabs, running searches in different engines and with slight variations on the phrase. “Okay,” he said after a few moments. “Let’s sidebar the fact that most of these results are from first-person accounts of multiple-personality disorder. That’s interesting, potentially relevant, but not where I know it from: here’s what clicked it for me.” He brought up a screen and leaned away from the monitor so Castle could see.

It was a page about Oz — not the Wizard of Oz specifically, but the other books and movies that had come out related to it, dozens of them by the looks of it. He vaguely remembered having read a few as a kid, with bright secondary-color covers and “Oz” in all the titles. Ozma of Oz, The Tin Woodsman of Oz, Three Men and a Baby in Oz, things like that. McCall’s search terms were lit up in yellow, as the quote of the day for an old version of the page, June 1st 2004: “I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t care.”

“His Majesty the Scarecrow of Oz,” Castle read. “Never read it.”

“The quote’s actually from the movie version,” McCall said. “Old silent film. I think Button Bright’s in some of the other books, though, the name’s familiar.”

“Gotta be some kind of asshole to name your girl Button Bright,” Castle said, and pulled a chair over while McCall typed some more.

McCall snorted. “It’s worse than that: Button Bright’s a boy. Looks like … a young boy a few years younger than Dorothy, who’s always getting lost, and always forgetting things. From Philadelphia before he ends up in Oz. Real name Saladin Paracelsus de Lambertine Evagne von Smith. Not sure that’s any better than Button Bright.”

“Kids would’ve called him Sally.”

“Exactly. Anyway, it looks like Button Bright just shows up in the movie, wanders in, gives his line — it’s one of the title cards, of course — and wanders off. The rest’s about a king forcing his daughter to marry someone she doesn’t want to, et cetera. I’ll find a copy.”

“Huh,” Castle said. “Still. Alice’s Adventures Underground. And now Oz.”

“And Mia’s childlike bedroom. Yes. Care to guess what Button Bright was doing when he first appeared in the Oz stories?”

“Haunting a house? Playing a music box?”

“Digging a hole as far down as he could, with no idea why.”

#

McCall phoned a few hours later with the polygraph results. “You lied about a few things,” he said. “But you told the truth about enough that I’ll pass you.”

“So you’ll take the case?” Castle asked.

“Yeah. Assuming you don’t think you’re in any immediate jeopardy, I’ll make my run of the downbelow and the rest of the house a week from today. That gives me time to finish my research, exchange notes with Ricky, and send a secretary over to organize your ephemera for you.”

“How do you mean?”

“The letters, diaries, all that. That might tell us what we need to know quicker than anything Ricky or I can dig up outside.”

“All right.” Castle frowned, disliking the idea for reasons he couldn’t put his finger on. “All right. Let me know when –”

“I figured I’d send someone the day after tomorrow, after I interview the call girl. I don’t want to go through a temp agency, so it’s a matter of calling my usual people or I’d have someone there today.”

“Oh. Sure. Okay.”

“Something wrong?”

“No, no. It’s a little soon. And — ah, I’ve got an appointment that day. People coming by.”

“Okay. Would this be a problem?”

“I don’t know. See, it’s — well, I called an exorcist, too. Not really called an exorcist, but I called a friend in the Church, and –”

“Jesus Christ.”

“No, not him.” Castle chuckled. He knew it was a fake chuckle and knew how fake it sounded.

“You’re at liberty to handle this situation however you like, Mr Finch, but I don’t think you went the right route there. I’ll leave it at that. I’ll wait to send someone over until after you’re done with that. All right?”

“Sure. Sure, okay.”

“And the girl next door? She’s fine. Name’s Jessica. Just broke up with her boyfriend, it seems, but she hasn’t been choked.”

“So there you go. And to think you didn’t trust Katrine.”

“I haven’t met Katrine. But I will tomorrow, and we’ll see what’s what then.”

“Yep.”

“Okay. And Castle –”

“Yeah?”

“Do you feel in jeopardy at all? Do you feel like you’re in danger?”

“No. Christ, no. Spooked a little. I feel like I’m making a big deal out of nothing, to tell you the truth, but in my family — that’s sort of what we do.”

“Well, look. I’m not saying your house is haunted, but I think you can safely say it isn’t nothing. You know, sometimes you call the termite guy, and it turns out you don’t have termites — but better safe than sorry.”

#

The moment McCall left, Castle had the urge to join him, to walk out the door with him. He’d started recognizing these urges: it was like when he’d quit smoking, and might go a week, two weeks, a month without thinking about smoking at all — and suddenly, out of nowhere, start craving a cigarette. The first time it happened it took him several minutes to even identify what he was craving; the second time, it made him understand how wistfulness could be a physical thing, something that bubbled through your chest like an antacid commercial. He’d used the analogy — not the antacid, but physical wistfulness — on a girl not three nights later, just another face in the Monaco-and-Milan set but someone he hadn’t seen in a few months. She’d sucked his cock an hour later and reprogrammed his cellphone.

He left the door open and just watched the outdoors for awhile. The hedges blocked most of the world beyond Domino, which had probably been the point once. But with the door open he could hear the jetskis and motorboats on the lake on the other side of the house, the sound of children shrieking somewhere, and a car or two driving through what was now a development and had once been a scattering of manor homes. Most of the land on this road had probably belonged to the owner of Domino once — Michael Van Der Linden, or Copland before him. One or both of them had decided that owning Domino was more important than owning the land around it, and had let it be sliced and diced into a patchwork quilt.

It was weird, trying to remember the neighborhood, the part of it he couldn’t see in the slice above his hedges: fringes of lawns and driveways, part of a house, lots of street. He’d only seen it once, and only for a few minutes before Reynolds brought him inside. He could picture the front of Jessica’s house but wasn’t sure if he really remembered it or was only inferring it from the side facing Domino. He could sort of picture the three houses as they spun out from the large cul-de-sac, and remembered at least three more — maybe four, maybe more — along the street. Wasn’t there a McDonald’s near the corner where the street ended in a T, joining the town proper? Or a gas station? Maybe it was one of those gas stations with a McDonald’s Express inside. Hell, maybe it was a Dunkin Donuts.

He could smell grass — not cut grass, just the simple smell of grass warmed by the sun, its tiny grains of pollen floating imperceptibly in diffuse clouds large enough that some of them tickled his nose. He could smell the lighter fluid someone — a teenager, probably, since it was still afternoon in the middle of the week — had used to ignite a charcoal grill, and the clotted greying hamburger fat dripping and sizzling into the heat. He could smell asphalt, the way it gets when it’s hot and sunny out all day and waves shimmer up from it. Dogshit, left to desiccate on the sidewalk that tapered away before it got anywhere near the main road — to discourage children from wandering too far, or to symbolically avoid creating an egress from the world to the development. Castle could see one of the tapering-off edges from his front door: it vanished several steps before the horizon, like that Far Side cartoon with the vanishing point.

He couldn’t see any people: they were obviously around, and he could hear them here and there, smell their evidence, but he couldn’t actually see any people. It was one of those things that wouldn’t have struck him before coming to Domino — because on an ordinary day he would have kept walking, past the front door, down the walk, out to and beyond the driveway, and no matter what kind of day it was, no matter what hour, he’d see someone eventually.

But right now, it could have been one of those Twilight Zone episodes where he woke up in a world populated by lizard people or photographic negatives.

Welcome to the circus, Sebastian.

He was tempted, more strongly than he’d been since the first day, to just walk through the door. Just walk through the door and fucking call Jonathan’s bluff. Did he believe the old guy really had the stones? Had the cold blue dick for it? Sure, Castle had spent hours under anesthesia and the next few days feeling like shit for it, and he had scars on his ankle and chest that weren’t there before. But wouldn’t those be good deterrents in of themselves?

Wouldn’t it be enough just to convince Castle that he’d die if he left the house? Didn’t that explain Jonathan’s almost entire lack of explanation as to the means?

He knew one of the things they said they implanted was a chip, a basic locater chip like pets got, and potential kidnap victims. But the other? An explosive? A poison? Another chip, in case he lost a foot or some damn thing?

Or just nothing at all?

Would they really risk killing him? If so, wouldn’t they have just done so from the start? Kill him and cover it up like they did with Rachael, making a strangulation look like a drug overdose as long as all you looked at were coroners’ reports and a death certificate.

The most likely case was that nothing would happen if he left the house except for an alarm being triggered. Some security guard would be paged, or some local crooked cop who had no idea what favor he was doing for the esteemed Senator would call Jonathan, or a SWAT team would surround him and the family would let him be arrested for two counts of murder and a side of manslaughter. He’d get a country club incarceration with minimum time served, but it’d be the end of everything for him, as much so as if he stayed in Domino forever.

The damage to the family would be immense. They’d never be the Kennedys. Never had been, although a cousin of a Finch cousin-in-law was married to a sister of a Kennedy brother-in-law. Hadn’t spread the power enough, had never had enough people in power at the same time, or gotten as far as Jack. But they’d never had the scandals, either. Sure, a little of this, a little of that, conspiracy one-sheets about “Nazi gold” because of a 19th century Finch’s dealings with German bankers, the usual Trilateral Commission nonsense, and a sideline of public spectacles — but nothing like Chappaquiddick. Castle’d been the worst, he’d been told over and over, but the worst he’d ever been charged with was misdemeanor reckless endangerment: trashing hotel rooms, drunk driving, bitchslapping a waiter, that was the kind of thing he got in trouble for.

Not murder.

Not yet.

He kept standing there. No one was going to force him to close the door. No one was going to care. No one, unless they happened to be far enough away to be up the hill of the street and looking at the far end of the cul-de-sac over his hedges, was even going to notice him, with his grape-purple face swollen like a Cronenberg movie. He’d be that guy: that quiet guy, who kept to himself, that the neighbors didn’t talk about until there was a reason to. None of them was even likely to know what he looked like, except Jessica.

Hours must have passed, because the shadows changed shape entirely, and the smell of grilling hamburgers dissipated as the air cooled, microdegree by microdegree. For a moment he caught a whiff of delivery pizza, the kind with the thick spicy red sauce and cheese that was yellow where it wasn’t golden — and then it was gone. Crickets, or those little frogs, or something, began to chirp, and citronella candle smoke wafted from someone’s yard. The sky slowly bruised.

He may well have fallen asleep, standing there, watching things change. It might have been fascination keeping him in place, or longing, or fear, or indecision. He was suddenly aware, after the sky had gone black and speckled, that dew had condensed on his shoes and the fine hairs on his skin: the suddenness of realizing this may have been because a sign of waking up, or he may simply have lapsed into a daze.

The dew, which meant it must have been the early pre-dawn hours, reminded him of summers at the Finch estate when he was very young, and for a moment he could swear he smelled wild strawberries. They’d grown along a gentle eight-foot slope in the borderlands where the carefully trimmed, landscaped, choreographed property tapered out into the wilder areas that were kept untamed — lightly forested, with a stream running through undiverted — as a buffer between the Finches and neighboring old money.

After his father died, when Castle was alternately coddled by everyone and ignored while they tended to their own directionlessness, he used to wander those scrublands all the time. The Finch lands extended for acres in every direction — even the groundskeepers didn’t traipse all of it, because there was just no reason to bother much with the wild brambles and johnny jump-ups of the fringe when there were award-winning rose bushes and finicky Norwegian ferns to tend to in time for the Better Homes and Gardens photoshoot.

He’d play all those games you play when you’re a kid that can eat up the day before you realize it but can’t remember ten years later, and he’d break off milk-leaking branches from the fuzzy-barked sumac trees and whip them back and forth to hear them whistle, or brave the hornets hovering near the peach trees, the prickers of the blackberry bushes, the sharp sourness of the wild leeks he kept thinking he liked because the smell reminded him of the French onion soup Cook made on Sundays. He’d make forts out of palm-leaf-shaped spruce branches, and try to follow deer tracks to find where they lived, and search the creekbed for frogs and skipping stones. He dug holes to China, knowing he wouldn’t reach China but figuring it was a good excuse for digging holes. He got dirty as allfuck, and sometimes his mother would yell at him and sometimes she wouldn’t notice.

And he ate wild strawberries.

He recognized the flavor years later when he had fraises des bois, the French wild strawberry gourmands went so nuts for: but this wasn’t quite the same, this was an American cousin, small — the size of a Cheerio — and heart-shaped and almost as juicy as a raspberry. There was a whole patch of the plants — each of them might have two fruits at a time, if that — on the side of that slope, overlooking the creek, with the guest house looming overhead and the manor visible to its north.

A chef in Madagascar, who’d trained in France and did a Master’s thesis for Princeton on the biology of taste, had told Castle that certain tastes, certain flavors, certain foods — because of the context in which they’re encountered, and especially because of seniority — set a standard against which all others would be measured. The western world thought everything tasted like chicken because chicken is a mild meat with an easy texture that children can handle, so chicken became the go-to “meat taste”; citrus fruits were always defined in terms of how they differed from the orange; and every family in North Carolina had a different recipe for barbecue, simply because every family in North Carolina had a different recipe for barbecue.

Wild strawberries were one of his primary tastes. Certain candies — a sharpness in Wild Cherry Lifesavers, Austrian strawberry pastilles, the wildfruits ganache in the chocolates from that place in Prague, and the smell but not the taste of Bubbalicious strawberry bubble gum — would always trigger a sense memory of those wild strawberries, often without him even realizing it. The smell of the gum on a girl’s breath would remind him of summer; the ganache would bring him back to Ander’s again and again. The first time he tripped, for what felt like days but was probably a passing fancy, he could taste strawberries: tiny, sharp, floral, sweet.

The wandering around the grounds didn’t last long: a few months after the election (in which Jacob Finch received a significant number of symbolic votes, which exit pollsters said were intended to “send a message”), the Widow Finch had remembered her son and sent him to boarding school in Spain for the spring, to some school she read about in a Time sidebar, a place pegged as “first of many to come, the Montessori school for the future,” and which eventually turned out a healthy number of wealthy theater majors with strong interests in non-European languages and conflict management theory. It was probably a good school. Castle had no memory of it whatsoever, and years later when he drove through its Toledo neighborhood, he noted to himself that he recognized none of it. But he knew his grades had been exceptional.

He had two more strawberry seasons, in between various schools and tutoring sessions, migrating from home to home like Wharton’s buccaneers while his mother tried to find that part of the world where nothing would remind her of the man she wanted everyone to remember her for. He didn’t remember much of them, either. Or maybe more truly, more tellingly, he remembered anecdotes: the things he said in interviews, answering the same questions over and over again when everyone came back to “check in on him.” Jacob Finch’s son is 13! How has this bright teenager dealt with living in the shadow of his father’s death? Jacob Finch is going to college! Will he go into politics? The law? Will he tease at the fringes like John-John, and start a magazine? Will he use his shares in those movie studios to start an acting career for himself?

If he did talk in his sleep, maybe the habit started with interviews.

Two years after Jacob’s death, Jonathan began to assume more public command of the family, and in doing so, he commissioned several minor construction projects at the estate: the greenhouse was modernized, the garage expanded to accommodate more cars, and a “spring pavilion” was built, perfect for large outdoor parties. Many of the wildflowers were trained to climb the trestles, and the slope was leveled to lay down the dance floor and the series of teardrop-shaped in-ground pools — barely too small to comfortably swim in, too cool to be hot tubs, too still to be jacuzzis, and ultimately only decorative.

The strawberry bushes were destroyed in the process: not through any design, but simply because no one but Castle knew they were there, and it never occurred to him to tell anyone, or suggest they be transplanted, or even to pick the berries one last time. No one noticed them: wild strawberries grow very low to the ground, looking like little more than clover or other weeds if you aren’t watching with a child’s or farmer’s eyes. The ridged tires of the construction vehicles macerated the plants, tearing them up roots and all, and there wasn’t so much as a bit of pulp left as a reminder when Castle came home from the Greek islands to see the pavilion.

A few years later, when Craetius Lightman was about to become his stepfather, he asked Castle if there was anything the boy would like, anything he wished he had — as a wedding present, he said. For whatever reason, “wild strawberries” popped out of his mouth, and the next day brought a gilt-wrapped videocassette of the Ingmar Bergman movie.

Castle leaned against the doorframe, his legs suddenly aware of how tired they were. He could have spent years picking wild strawberries, in Maine or Virginia or Alaska — or fraises des bois in France and Sweden. He could have become the guy to finally learn how to cultivate them without crossbreeding them with domesticated species and winding up with the palatable but bloated and somehow ridiculous fruit you found in gardens and supermarkets. He could, if nothing else, have used his money to perfect the technique of drying or conserving them, producing the finest strawberry conserves in the world, or crispy-chewy morsels of dehydrated strawberries for artisanal granolas and trail mixes.

There were a dozen other things he could have done instead, all of which would have been better, made more sense, been less Howard Hughes-y — not just a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, and that was the thing. Even the strawberry thing was better than what he had done, which was not a damn thing, a trickle here and a tickle there. Just pisstrails and fingerprints.

He could leave. Surely they wouldn’t poison him, or blow him up, or whatever it was Jonathan implied. They’d just look for him. It was a big world: he could hide. Not even hide so much as disappear: stop being Castle Finch. He had plenty of money. Just grabbing a painting from the house would give him a nest egg to kick off with, but cash alone, he could have a few hundred grand to run off with.

Just run. Just go away. Just stop being Castle. First you put on the mask, and then you become the mask. You think like the mask and they never catch you, never find you, never know who you are. It would be easy. He wouldn’t be where they’d look for him, wouldn’t do what they’d expect him to do, because he wouldn’t be him: he’d be Jack, or Max, or Paul, or Johnny, just some guy with money, and he wouldn’t even have to dye his hair or get plastic surgery or anything. They’d be looking for him in Prague and Vienna, Bangkok and Sydney, places where people with money went. They’d be checking five-star hotels, and St John’s in London, and Nobu in New York: not Motel 6 and Der Wafflehaus.

They’d be looking for money, and he’d be showing nothing but shoe leather.

He could vanish. He could disappear.

Just run.

Just go.

While you still can.

You just have to be someone else. He’d never find you if you just left. The only reason it never works is because no one does it. No one ever really runs away. They just avoid. Avoiding isn’t the same as disappearing. It’s all he had to do, just ditch, just skedaddle, just cheese it, hit the road with a thumb to the wind and a wad in his back pocket, stay out of trouble and set down roots somewhere where nobody knew him. He just had to stop being Michael, and everything would be all right, and he could have everything he wanted.

Just stop being Michael, and show a little teeth. There’s always another barndance. There’s always another round-and-round.

Castle closed the door on the dawn and promptly sank to his knees, legs buckling in a forest of pins and needles. He didn’t know what frightened him more: that the voice he was thinking in wasn’t his; or that his reaction to that fear had been to shut himself inside Domino, wrapping it — her — him — around himself like a blanket that would keep the monsters away.