A little ink more or less

8.

“There’s something — in her mouth.”

“What?” Castle asked, calling down the stairs. The housing inspector was down there somewhere, checking out “the structure” with his officious laserprinted checklist on his clipboard. Castle’d been all ready to make excuses for not accompanying him, when the inspector told him he wasn’t allowed to: authorized municipal personnel only until the structure had been “declared.”

“What’s that?” the inspector called up the stairs now, sounding distant and tunneled. “Did you say something?”

“Nevermind,” Castle called back. “I thought you were calling me.”

“Nawp. Be up there in a minute!”

The voice hadn’t been the inspector’s, as he knew damn well. It’d been female — young and female and breathy, like whispers through smoke. The kind of voice that shouldn’t carry but did. The kind of voice he’d heard before, a few times now. Right now, in the middle of the day, with the normal as all get out housing inspector down there — right now, the voice just kind of pissed him off. Right now, he passed it off as a side effect of the several medications he was on.

At night, of course, it would force him to pop a few more so he could get to sleep.

So he twiddled his thumbs, and when the inspector came back up, flashlight preceding him, making his slow way up the stairs, Castle put his expectant face on and held it fast. “Well?” he said. “Is this place going to tumble down like the house of Usher?”

The inspector clucked his tongue. “Aw, naw, you don’t have to worry about nothing like that. Here now. I need you to sign here, and here, and press down hard on this one, or I’ll have to get a new set of forms. You have the three hundred dollars for the processing fee?”

“Yep.” He’d written the check out already, and signed the forms on all the x’s. “So everything’s fine?”

“Naw,” the inspector said. “Naw, Mr Boyd, you got some fixin you gotta do, but for your animal control people there, it’s fine, they can do their thing. You got your grandfather clause covering a lot of this — house was built in 1923, before a lot of the codes and all — but even if you didn’t, it’s in pretty good shape down there. Mostly what you’d need would be some fire protection, you know, on account of it being underground so you can’t just jump out a window or anything if a blaze were to go up. Now, by law, I’m gonna have to file a copy of my report with your insurance company, and I’ll tell you right off, that’s gonna make your rates shoot up what with that fire hazard — if’n I was you, I’d call them before they get my report, see if you can get them to commit in writing to the rate, or at least give you some idear of what to expect.”

“Uh-huh,” Castle said. “Hey, how far down’s it go, anyway?”

“Three floors,” the inspector said, and grinned. “Three floors down from this one. It’s like a whole nother house, Mr Boyd. Quite a lovely thing, I must say, at least the way it seems in my head. I couldn’t hardly see a thing even with the flashlight, and it’s walls and beams I was more worried about. It’s like — well, it’s like an ordinary house, you know, a big one, only except for you got your stairs going down instead of up, don’t you? Now, the big things you gotta worry about here are, number A, you got some rooms down there need excavating so to speak, that’s what took me so long, had a lot of climbing over I had to do. Just general accumulation, you know. Number B, you got to fix the wiring.”

“Why?” Castle asked. “Is there a short down there?”

“Ain’t just no short, the whole board’s blown. The underhouse — that’s what I’m calling it there, see, cause it’s not set up like a basement, whatcha call, schematic-wise — the underhouse is on its own thing, even got its own separate hookup with the electric company, but you can consolidate those easy enough. Anyway, there ain’t no power at all right now, and even if it were juiced it wouldn’t matter.” He reached over and flicked the switch back and forth. Nothing happened. “See? Busted. Rotted out in places. I’d say the wiring ain’t been working for two, three decades.”

The light had been on when he’d gone down, after animal control left. It’d gone off suddenly — been switched off, he’d been convinced at the time — while he was down there on the stairs, with Something.

“Ah,” he said, and he didn’t need a mirror to know he’d gone a little pale and shaky. “All right. Well. I’ll call the electrician, then.”

The inspector smiled. “Here’s my brother-in-law’s number, right here on your copy of the form. He’ll put you at the top of the queue on account of it being, well, you know.”

“Kicked over from you, sure.”

“Well. I was going to say ‘an inspection matter,’ but yeah. Anything else, Mr Boyd?”

“Actually, yes — did you see any evidence of animals down there or anything? I mean, this all started with animal control…”

“Mmyeah. There are rat droppins, sure. Plenty of spider webs. Beyond that — it’s difficult for me to be sure, since I was using the flashlight and looking more at structural concerns. But no cat, not that I saw. Still –”

“The rat droppings.”

“Yes.”

“All right. Thanks, then.”

#

So everything was fine down there. A whole new house. He really should take a look. Not taking a look was like laying in bed with the covers over your head when you’ve heard a noise — it paid more attention to the thing, gave it more power, than actually doing something would. Only this was bigger.

First he called the electrician the inspector had kicked him to, who would be there “first thing in the morning, Mr Boyd, and you understand I’d be there now if I didn’t know this was gonna be an all day job,” and then animal control, setting up an appointment for them to come out the day after, Friday.

Then he had a late lunch, which he hadn’t gotten around to yet — torn romaine with strips of chicken breast, grape tomatoes, salt-cured Moroccan olives, and sheep’s milk sour cream, the kind of lunch that looked small but that he could take his time cooking — and got three flashlights, a radio, extra batteries, and a backpack. No more running out of light. And if he heard something spooky? Fuck em, he’d blast David Banner.

By the time he made it down the stairs, he’d decided that a cursory walk-through — the normal, curious, “oh, I own an underground house, do I? do let’s take a gander” sort of thing — would be enough. The stairs passed by much quicker than he remembered — he almost wished he had counted the stairs when he walked them in the dark, so he could compre them with this second time, with the halogen flashlight illuminating them so well it was practically daylight. A sickly, ghostly daylight anyway, one that piddled along in knuckle white. But if he’d counted them, he might now find out there’d been more then than there were now — and then what?

The way the halogen light shone like a tube through the room reminded him of the way light looked underwater, when you were down far enough to need it. Dust drifted through its current like air bubbles in the deep, and it was impossible to tell anything’s true color. And sound, sound was muffled somehow — by age, by acoustics, by being underground, who knew. He tried to remember if he had noticed things sounding different in basements before, and failed — the only recollection he could bring back with any certainty was the echoey tincan sound of the T stations in Boston.

The stairs had twisted such that he was pretty sure they’d bridged most of the distance from the gatehouse, and brought him back down beneath the house proper: that made sense, since the alternative was for the downbelow to spread out beneath adjacent properties, or at least come considerably closer to them. But the slow sloping corridor-like quality to the stairs increased that muffled feeling, that faraway feeling. He actually kind of felt like kicking something, a can or a rock, just to see if it would echo like that — or if it would send cockroaches scurrying.

Oh Christ, he thought, as the spiderwebs broke against his face like fine hair, You just had to think of cockroaches, didn’t you? He didn’t have a phobia of bugs, but he had a hatred for them inherited from his mother, who focused on insects of the infesting kind — cockroaches, flies, mealworms, and maggots above all else — as emblematic of everything she should be protected from, as a wealthy woman of good breeding. A pleasure he’d once had in killing them — cockroaches particularly, which were somehow more satisfying, with their crunching — had, since childhood, faded into simple and unclouded revulsion. He liked to think he didn’t have the class hang-ups his mother did — but he knew how ridiculous rich kids could be when they said things like that. Like the girl who’d said she wasn’t snobby, she’d drink Pepsi if she had to — with no sense of irony of self-awareness at all.

You learned to laugh when laughed at, in moments like that, and never let on that you don’t know why it’s funny. Girls could get away with it better than guys. Very rich women, they could be soft and daft, they could be seen as useless: it was part of their charm. Men? Men had to be vicious, aggressive, canny. Men had to be prepared to re-earn every penny they were born to.

Show neither neck.

But even though he couldn’t stop thinking about cockroaches now, nothing skittled across the floor. He walked slowly, and his footsteps — in big clunky boots he’d worn so he could stomp the shit out of any creepy feral rats who attacked him — weren’t echoey so much as cavernous — cadaverous, he thought — like when you step on the metal dividers between train compartments, or on a manhole cover.

That, of course, reminded him that there were several floors below him still, and only a single housing inspector who had approved the place in the dark. What if the floor caved in? What if he got stuck? What if he fell down the stairs? No one would –

– well. Then again. He could fall down the stairs upstairs, too. He could be there for days with a broken leg, unable to move. If he were really worried about it, he could get one of those fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up rigs, the clapper or whatever it was called.

“Hi,” he said out loud. It came out wrong, it came out too low-talking, too don’t-wake-the-baby, so he said it again. “Hi.” Normal tone of voice. Perfectly ordinary. Other than it not being ordinary to say hi in empty rooms.

“I am the very model of a modern major general,” he said, still in that normal everyday how’s-it-going-neighbor tone of voice. “Anne is an avocado. Jalapeno whizbang jellybean boom.”

Nothing fluttered off like he’d startled it, so he walked some more, shining the light around over and over again, both in quick skimming sweeps and in slower detailed focus. He was trying to — to not so much get his bearings, as to create a mental map of where he was. He didn’t think he’d ever quite thought before about what a strange thing it is to be alone in an unfamiliar room in the dark. A familiar room in the dark, that was nothing — you did it every day, waking up or going to sleep, whatever, not only did you not think about it but the darkness wasn’t even really darkness.

An unfamiliar room, with someone else? Most of the times, they were familiar with it. Someone else’s bedroom, or arriving at someone else’s house late at night. That sort of thing. You followed their lead. You showed neck.

Even a hotel room rarely counted, because they were built with familiarity in the mix. And besides you usually at least glimpsed them in the light before encountering them in the dark.

Maybe that’s why children were more afraid of the dark. They weren’t as familiar yet. Not with anything. They hadn’t built up those habits that let you pretend the darkness wasn’t there.

So the way he had to look at this was, not that he was in a weird fucked-up basement under a weird fucked-up house where a lot of fucked-up shit had been going on that was starting to piss him off. No, he had to look at it as exploring — eagerly and curiously exploring — his newly doubled space. He was a prisoner, after all, and someone had just told him his cell had an extra room. Shouldn’t he be excited?

Just think: he could put a movie theater in down here. Or a bowling alley. Or a bowling alley with a movie theater in it. Or a Starbuck’s. The possibilities were limitless. This place would be great once he got the lights on and sent a cleaning crew through.

What he’d do, he decided, is just take a quick jaunt through the major rooms on each floor, just to see, you know, what he was dealing with here. Just to see how much space there was. After all, the electrician might ask him something, or animal control, and it felt strange to say, “Why, I don’t know, I haven’t been in that room of my house.” He’d been like that as a kid. Always had to know every room in every house. There were more than a few houses, especially if you counted Finch estates proper, and not just those of Jacob Finch or his widow.

“Okay,” he said out loud again. “Mr Housing Inspector wasn’t freaked out by being down here. He didn’t get spooked. So there’s no reason to be spooked. And probably what I should do,” is stop talking about being spooked. And stop thinking about it.

He did his circuit of the first basement, making a show of looking at everything in the main room — it reminded him of many second floors, with one main room the staircases connected to, and doors leading to the subsidiary rooms, which would have been bedrooms, studies, sewing rooms and the like if this were an ordinary house. As it was, they looked like …

… well, at a glance, like bedrooms, studies, sewing rooms, and the like.

How the hell many people had lived in this house? He knew Jonathan had picked a large place as some kind of compensation for Castle being trapped here indefinitely. But this was ridiculous. It really was a double house, and the original house was big to begin with.

He made it to the next floor with more confidence. The stairs were sturdy, and the darkness actually helped preserve the illusion that he was in any ordinary house, letting him forget he was deeper and deeper underground. It was cool down here — cool like cold, cold enough he wondered if he’d be able to see his breath if he were to shine the flashlight in front of his face. Something brushed against him, cobwebs, but it felt exactly like the edge of a woman’s nightgown. Gooseflesh rippled his arms, and the sense-memory of it creeped him out a little: reminded him of times when he’d gone a-goosebump for reasons that had jack and shit to do with the temperature.

Layout the same, largely, except in specifics. There was a kitchen here — covered in dust, sink stained and fixtures tarnished — and a considerable library that smelled like the bottom of a wine bottle mixed with wadded-up men’s room paper towels. He recognized many of the titles from upstairs — others he wasn’t sure of, but they seemed to be the standard selection of classics and Victoriana that, were there such a thing as the generic or Platonic Upper Crust Library, would constitute the bulk of its holdings.

He’d counted a total of six rooms on the first basement — and now six more down here, plus a bathroom off of the kitchen. Kitchen, dining room, library, something that must have been a laundry room assuming that awkward boxy thing was a washer or dryer, living room and study. The design — some ethereal quality he could never pinpoint but always pick up, a gift of the attentive rich that let you feign familiarity with a new expensive dish or assess the relative class of a stranger based on their home — sniffing out, without thinking about it, the clever differences between selfmade software millionaire, sixth generation exports magnate, and low-country baronet — the design reminded him of the house proper, somehow. Built at the same time, he supposed. Why on Earth wasn’t this on the blueprints? Surely “big fuckoff underground secret house, perfect for the swinging bachelor’s Batcave” was a good value-add in any real estate transaction.

His halogen flashlights — he had one in each hand now, swinging them around like guns in a Matrix movie — diffused more here, because the walls were decorated with dust-covered, smudgy mirrors. They seemed to occupy many of the spaces which would otherwise be windows, which was as natural-seeming as it was fucking eerie, because it meant that everything around him was constantly moving in the corner of his eye. Every time his flashlight moved, a dozen lights moved with it. Every time he took a step, a dozen shadows crept somewhere new.

As with the first floor, he had to cross over the large room in order to get to the down-going stairs. As he did so — just as he was feeling perfectly fine about everything, albeit beginning to wonder if there might be any problems with the air quality, given the lack of plants to exhale oxygen, much less any sort of ventilation system or the like — he heard something from one of the rooms he’d just passed. The living room or study.

“Tch-tchk-tch-tchk-tchk-tch,” it went. Almost like that machine-gun noise kids make when they’re playing army. The kind of noise that, when you heard it in the dark with no obvious source, you couldn’t be sure it was human and you couldn’t be sure it wasn’t. “Tch-tchk-tch-tchk.” He could picture in his head — if picture was the right verb — the way you’d make the noise, all teeth and tongue, no voice necessary, nothing identifiable.

It was a rapid, wet noise, as though the person making it had a mouth half-full of spit.

He brought the flashlights around and together, as though wielding lightsabers, and was struck by a sudden memory of doing exactly that: playing with his father’s Maglite in a dark closet and pretending dad’s trenchcoat was Darth Vader.

“Who’s there?” he asked, taking a few seconds to rehearse it in his head first and make sure that it came out sounding strident, territorial, and a little annoyed. “This is private property.”

“Tch-tchk-tch-tchk-tchk-tch,” it continued, and he shone the light in the study. Nothing but gleam off of the dark wood of a writing desk, where dust had been rubbed away by something and left a sheen behind. The housing inspector? There was no reason against him touching anything — and maybe he’d had to get by it to look at the support beams or something, put a hand on the desk to steady himself.

“If you’ve been squatting,” Castle said, “We can work something out.” Because that suddenly struck him and even made sense: it’d be easy to get away with squatting, wouldn’t it, in a house no one knew about?

He couldn’t hear the sound anymore, but he was positive it came from this room. He swung the lights slowly, examining everything he could see in the colorless dusty dank: the hardwood writing desk with elongated, dragged-looking fingermarks on its side, like someone had placed a hand down in the dust and then pulled it to the edge; the small bookshelf built into the wall, with spider-webbed bookends shaped like a satyr peering around the books at an aloof mermaid; the leather couch, matching armchair, and ottoman, which were probably scuffed or in need of retooling; the three perfectly square mirrors set into the wall like a triangle, two higher than the third, and the murk of grime and dust which clung to them, making them reflect little more than light and silhouette; the bar with a few cut-glass tumblers and bottles too dust-veiled to identify.

The floor was hardwood, the clompy kind, with a thick rug that looked like it was probably red when it wasn’t covered in beige dust and lit by ill green light. The dust was still undisturbed, even by the writing desk. No sign of anyone in here. No sign of any animals.

“Tch-tchk-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tchk-tch.” Faster this time, and from behind him, close behind him. His heart thumped once, hard and sudden, against his chest, and he whirled around. Cobwebs brushed his cheek and temples, but he didn’t see anything. The sound was almost like the way people will keep a beat to a song, a rhythm — not humming but the percussion equivalent, so to speak. Chika-chika-boom.

“There’s something in her mouth,” that young girl voice said now, clearly, distinctly, but with a rattle to it that was half-tinny, half-phlegmy. “There’s something — in her mouth.” He could hear it well enough now to pick out tone of voice: slightly incredulous, slightly plaintive. Like when you need help but can’t quite believe the reason why. “In her mouth.”

“Tch-tchk-tchk-tchk-tch.”

Directly opposite the study was the kitchen, so he checked there. The light hit something it shouldn’t have before he was halfway to the room, a glint of metal he didn’t remember seeing last time, shiny and dark like something well-enameled. He moved closer, shined the light a little to the side to avoid the glare, and for a moment was certain he’d moved the light onto something: but he’d only caught his reflection in another of those fucking window mirrors.

What had caught his eye, though, was a music box. An old-fashioned one. It looked familiar, again in that born-to-quality way where you can tell craftsmanship from across an auction house. Precious woods held together with fine metals, concealing complicated clockworks inside.

This one was shaped like a circus tent. Like the big top. And the crank was turning slowly, the way it does of its own accord after you’ve wound it up: but it was turning backwards. He didn’t know why he was so certain of that — wasn’t sure he would have known, cold, what the right way to crank a music box was — but he was certain nonetheless.

“In her mouth,” came the voice from the music box, which didn’t have a speck of dust on it. “There’s something in her mouth.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said, ridiculously relieved when he shouldn’t have been: something had cranked the music box, after all, and a rat couldn’t do that. But it must have been the housing inspector. He’d heard it when the inspector was down here, after all. The inspector must have been fiddling with it, and maybe the gear got stuck until a few moments ago. Old clockworks, that wasn’t the least bit surprising. “Jesus fucking Christ, this place is going to give me a heart attack.”

“Tch-tchk-tch-tchk-tch.”

This time the tch-tchk was right in front of him, right there. He didn’t see a thing, but he caught motion from the nook of his eye, and shined the flashlight towards it.

Nothing. Nothing but mirror. Except that his reflection’s lips were moving: “Tch-tch-tchk-tchk-tch-tch,” and the moment he noticed, he felt his lips doing it, felt his tongue dipping minutely at the front of his mouth as air whistled against his teeth, “tch-tchk-tchk-tch,” over and over again and faster.

He stopped as soon as he wanted to, and stood perfectly still, absolutely uncertain if he’d been doing it all along or not. It was the uncertainty that made his skin sink now, crinkling his spine as it did, and he decided without deciding, that the next floor could wait. It could damn well wait. He grabbed the music box on some kind of impulse, and walked calmly and oh so very quietly back up the stairs, the dust of the downbelow in his eyes and its spiderwebs preying upon his hair.

“In her dirty mouth!” the music box girl insisted, as the crank wound down. “Her dirty filthy mouth!”