Downbelow Domino, Chapter Four
March 27th, 20084.
Castle examined every inch of earth, but there were no holes. However the cat, rat, whatever, had gotten in, it didn’t seem to have been through the garden. The soil was slightly moist, in that way gardens often are, but not loose enough for a hole to disappear itself. There was a garden snake — garter snake? he’d called it both as a kid and couldn’t remember what it was actually called — he found when he turned over one of the flatter rocks, but for one thing, it was in the garden, not the house; and for another, he wasn’t sure a snake could knock over a glass longneck.
It sure as hell couldn’t lick up come.
He kept returning to that, because it so desperately needed explanation. The knocked-over bottle, and the frantic scrabbling he’d heard as he came down the stairs to see what it was — a scrabbling like claws on hardwood, a sound he knew from childhood pets and the pets of others — gave him a good excuse to look for Domino’s mystery mascot. Thinking to himself, “Here I am, looking for the mysterious thing that ate my come,” was creepier than, “Here I am, looking for the stray cat or whatever that got stuck in the house.”
The garden was a bust, unless it was a bird at work. Did birds have tongues? Yeah, he remembered something about larks’ tongues. Could a bird lick something up, though? They didn’t seem lick-inclined. He’d never seen one licking anything, not like he had cats and dogs. He’d seen plenty of pigeons, parrots, et cetera, but never licking anything.
Right now, though, a bird was the strongest contender. The garden was open to the sky. The house was open to the garden — at least more open to the garden than it was to, say, the Franklin Zoo’s West African Come-Licking Koala Cage. Okay. A bird.
He sat down on what he knew from too many furniture catalogues and home redesigns would have been called a meditation bench or rarewood reflection lounger in the showroom, a seat placed slightly askew from the arrangement of the rocks in the garden, so you could sit and … contemplate, or whatever.
Reynolds wasn’t in his speed dial, but he had him in memory somewhere from before he’d moved in. Castle found him soon enough, and sat there in the warm garden, the smell of soil and flowers and leaves around him, wondering why a bird would scrabble its claws along the floor instead of flying. Maybe it’d been hurt. Busted a wing. Like in Watership .
“George Reynolds,” the buyer said after the fourth ring.
“Hey,” Castle said. “It’s Castle Finch.”
“Mr Finch!” Reynolds sounded business-like nervous. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, you know the garden room?”
“Mmhuh.” A noncommittal noise, probably because of Reynolds’s going behind Jonathan’s back to keep the room intact.
“I heard a bird in the house last night, I think. I figure, it probably got in through the garden, right?”
“Sure, that makes sense. Have you been leaving the door open?”
He hadn’t opened it once since Reynolds had given him the tour. “I don’t know, I might’ve been. Can you hook me up with like … a bird exterminator?”
“I can have Animal Control sent over.”
“All right, yeah, I guess that’s what I mean. Set it up for me, okay?”
“Yes sir, Mr Finch. Anything else?”
“No. No, I’m good.”
A pause as Reynolds didn’t hang up, and then: “How’re you doing?”
“Fine. It’s no Caribbean vacation, but a guy could find himself in worse places, right?”
“Yes, exactly the right way to look at it, I think. You know, I haven’t seen any work orders across my desk. Are you — well. Sir, Mr Finch –”
“Castle.”
“Mr Castle — are you socializing at all? Having friends over and the like?”
“Sure, of course, yeah. This is Castle Finch, remember? Fuck, of course, sure.”
He found himself pacing the downstairs, between the kitchen where he was trying his hand at chicken marsala — should he make enough to offer some? — and the study, where he websurfed message boards chosen completely at random. He was a wound-up ball of fidgets, totally unable to stay still, completely skittish — uneasy, even? anxious? or only excited? — at the idea of someone visiting him.
Even though it was only someone who was going to look for hidden birds.
Animal Control arrived at 4:13 in the afternoon, in the form of Officer Dom Pesky — whose apology for taking so long seemed to be an excuse for him to ramble about the paranoid parents who’d called him about dogs in their neighborhood — and Officer Nanette Schill, who nodded curtly at each of Pesky’s statements.
Castle didn’t mind. They were people, in the flesh, and they were in his house. He felt so pathetic for feeling that way, but there you had it.
“Well, listen,” he said, “just let me know what you need, how I can help. I mean, for all I know, it’s somebody’s pet bird, right? They probably want it back.”
Pesky shot Schill a look, and then angled his head down towards his flipback notebook. “Any reason you have for thinking it’s a domesticated bird, Mr Boyd?”
“Just a speculation. It doesn’t seem bothered by being indoors — I haven’t heard any squawking, wings, things like that.”
“Mmhmm, mmhmm,” Pesky said. “Well, Mr Boyd, I’m not yet convinced we’re dealing with an avian incursion here, but if you’d like to accompany us we’ll see what we can do by way of assessing the situation.”
“The one about your bird there,” Schill put in.
Castle nodded vaguely at her. Pesky was a gangly, shriveled man who looked like he’d grow up to be Don Knotts; Schill wasn’t exactly America’s Next Top Model, with her awkward face and mannish build, but she was still the first woman he’d seen in the flesh in weeks. He could smell her perfume, something cheap and too sweet, and it clashed with her shampoo, which smelled much better: jojoba, chrysanthemum, some kind of tropical fruit. She probably spent more money on the shampoo than the perfume, and didn’t realize it.
“All right,” he said, too forcefully, too loudly, trying to shake himself out of it. “Where would you like to start?”
Schill waved her flashlight, since he was looking at her. “Why don’t we start with the attic, sir, and work our way down?”
“Sure. Great. I love the attic. It’s not an attic, really. The third floor. Let’s go. I’m making chicken.”
“I’m sure the bird doesn’t realize that, sir.”
Right. Yeah. He took them upstairs, bumping into the telescope as he walked around the room, just enough so that it wasn’t pointing anywhere in particular, and over the next three hours they made a careful, thorough inspection of the house, looking for signs of nesting, droppings, clawmarks, and other telltale signs he felt like an idiot for not thinking of. The sealed-off bathroom, he said when they asked, had been sealed-off when he moved in, and no he didn’t know why.
“Well,” Schill said, “We ought to check that anyway, but especially if it’s been closed since you moved in, Mr Boyd.”
“Yeah,” Castle said. “I guess that’s true.”
“You’re sure you don’t mind?” Pesky asked, and Castle shook his head.
“I need to go check on the food downstairs. But go ahead, do whatever you need to do, that bird’s been keeping me up, you know? And like I said and all, maybe it’s a pet.”
He puttered in the kitchen, tapping his spoon distractedly against the pot, listening to them unseal the door upstairs. He’d have to seal it off all over again. If he knew a damn thing about plumbing, he could just remove the bathtub himself. Maybe he’d learn. Goddamn it.
“It’s gotta eat,” Pesky said when they’d completed their circuit without any luck, “and it’s gotta sleep, and it’s gotta shit.”
“Pardon my Jewish,” Castle mumbled, and shook his head when they both gave him a look. “Sorry, it’s something my grandfather used to say. So you’re saying there’s no bird?”
“Well now,” Schill said, “I wouldn’t say we’re saying that.”
“No,” Pesky said. “We’re not saying there’s no bird. We’re saying there’s no birdsign. Not yet. Not here.”
“Not there.” Schill shook her head. “No birdsign.”
“But?”
“But we’re not done yet,” Pesky said. “That fucked up, pardon your Jewish, garden lends a lot of creditability to your theory about the bird there. Bird might not be living here, see.”
“Bird might not be nesting,” Schill said.
“Bird might just be, whatcha call, transcendent.”
“Got it,” Castle said. “All right, so if the bird is transient — transcendent — uh, what then? How do I know that’s what it is?”
“Hit him with it, Nette,” Pesky said, and Schill snorted.
“Bird might not be a bird,” she said, and they both started walking back towards the corridor that led to the store. “You said you got a basement down there, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I haven’t used it for anything. It’s just a bathroom, a small one.”
“Exactly the thing,” Pesky said. “See, your basement goes unused there, no one coming and going, no people-scent, no intrusion. It’s like, whatcha call, back to nature. Like abandoned houses, where the squirrels come in and live on the old beds and things, birds make nests from curtain threads, you know.”
“Owls,” Schill said. “Owls in the eaves, and rats in the dresser.”
“Scorpions,” Pesky said ominously, “in the stovetops. So that when the new owner lights it — out they come, skedaddle.” He drew the initial s’s out. Ssscorpions in the ssstovetops. Out they come ssskedaddle. Welcome to the Sscircus, Sssebastian.
Castle cleared his throat. “Scorpions in Massachusetts?”
Pesky shined his light around the floor in the basement, especially over the creases the overhead light left in shadow. The room was like a square with a very neat bite taken out of it, and that bite was the bathroom. Reynolds’s guys had made sure it was spic and span, but the rest of the place looked pretty run down. “Houses are abandoned all over the place, Mr Boyd,” he said. “Not just in Massachusetts.”
“Pesk,” Schill said, and gestured her light over something. “Look here.” She leaned forward as she knelt down on the ground, and God help him, Castle found himself looking down her shirt. She had nice breasts. You know what I want, he found himself thinking. I want to fuck your mouth. I don’t just want you to suck me off. I want to sink my hands into your hair to hold you steady, and fuck your mouth. The thought was so abrupt, so sudden, that he felt himself getting hard, right there in the basement, where it smelled like must and old pipe tobacco.
Christ almighty.
“Well now,” Pesky said, and nodded in what looked like self-satisfaction. “Mr Boyd, I don’t think it’s a bird you’ve got sneaking around your hallways there.”
Castle looked where the light shined: a small crack in the wall, where it met the floor, like the wood had receded, or hadn’t been brought down far enough. How did they make walls, anyway? Did that make sense, “hadn’t been brought down far enough”?
“Rat,” Schill said. “Maybe a mouse. Weasel. Something like that.”
“Could might be a badger,” Pesky added. “Can’t tell yet. But some kind of rodent seems probable.”
“Okay,” Castle said. “What are we saying here, something burrowed through my wall? In the basement? That seems pretty damn determined.”
“Wasn’t burrowed,” Schill said. “Looks like this might have been a door. Found a mouse in a disk drive more than once — back in the day, you know, when computers had them floppy disks? You have a crowbar, Mr Boyd? Assuming you want to investigate further?”
“Sure. Yeah. Just take it easy, if we’re going to do any real damage I want to make sure we have a reason to. Be right back.”
Reynolds had shown him the tool closet on the first floor, and although he wasn’t positive there was a crowbar there, it has seemed pretty packed. Sure enough, he found two of them, of slightly different sizes, and brought them both down. Pesky and Schill, in the meantime, had cleared away the dust and accumulated grit around the wall — a surprising amount of it, Castle saw. The place was dirtier than it looked down here, maybe because it was so dim.
Pesky took one of the crowbars from him and put its business end into a crack in the wall where the wood paneling came together. “Mr Boyd,” he said, “if you could join me here with your crowbar, we’d be risking less damage to the wall — especially if it turns out it isn’t a door.”
“Sure,” Castle said, and wedged it on in.
“Pret-ty exciting,” Schill said. “A secret door in your own house there, it might be!”
“I haven’t been here long,” Castle said, as he and Pesky started pulling at the bars. “Guess I was bound to find it sooner or later.”
“Probably just an ice cabinet,” Schill said, shining the light for them while they pried, going slow so they wouldn’t fuck with the wood more than they needed to. “Something like that, you know, some obsolete room. See it sometimes in these old houses.”
“Wine cellar,” Pesky said with an oomp. “Some unused wine cellar got locked off so’s they wouldn’t have to worry about keeping it to code, that’s my guess. You got a wine cellar, Mr Boyd?”
“Nope,” Castle said.
“So there you go. Big house like this, all nice and all, a wine cellar’s out of place when it isn’t here.”
The door popped open with a cloud of dust and dirt which had caked onto its edges, unseen for God knows how long. For a moment, before it settled, as it passed the beam of Schill’s flashlight, the dust had a remarkably evocative smell: like wet dogs settling down in a used bookstore amidst stacks of burning hay. Even the stoic Pesky made a face — not a frown, not a grimace, just the smell, the intensity of it, registering for him.
“Glory,” he murmured, and then louder, “Well, Mr Boyd, do you mind my going in? Maybe we’ll find your mischievious friend, then.”
“Sure, go ahead,” Castle said, taking the crowbar from him and resting them both against the wall. The other side of the door had a handle on it, a wooden switch that reminded him of pull-down fire alarms. The room it opened into didn’t look like a wine cellar, although from what he could see of it it may have been one at some point: but what it looked like, what his first impression was even through the shadow was a waiting room.
Not just a waiting room, he thought, because just like with the dust, there was a vivid, gutpunch specificity to it. A waiting room in the emergency room. The room you sit in, friends and family, while waiting for the doctor to come out and tell you they didn’t make it. He pulls his mask down before telling you they’re dead.
“Looks like a foyer, almost,” Pesky mused, and Castle blinked.
“What you might call a vestibule,” Schill said.
“Vestibule’s too small. This here, it’s more like your antechamber.”
“Whatever it is,” Castle said, “Did an animal come out of it?”
Pesky nodded downwards to where his light was pointing. The inside of the door, at the base where the gap had shown, was covered with scratches. “Looks like it. There’s rat droppings, too. You smell that? That low, earthy, dusty smell?”
“That’d be ratshit, then.”
“Ayuh.”
That’s where Castle recognized his accent from — Pesky was from northern New England somewhere, New Hampshire or Maine. Not Vermont, they all talked like surfers now. “Okay, what do we do now?”
Pesky shined the light back and forth across the foyer-vestibule-antechamber. It wasn’t very large, but he was right: too large to call it a vestibule. Maybe twice the size of a dorm room. Doorways at the two ends perpendicular to the door they’d opened: one doored and closed, one open, but it was too dark to see where it led. There was an overhead light, and an old-fashioned wall-switch that didn’t work; no telling right now whether it was just the bulb, or the wiring too: Castle didn’t remember seeing “secret room in basement” listed in the fusebox, but he didn’t take a real close look. “Let’s take a look.”
The three of them, preceded by two flashlit pools, examined the antechamber, Pesky noting the rat droppings and claw marks in the dust. The room was still enough that Castle could hear Schill’s breathing, and he kept feeling the impulse to move closer to her, either protectively or for protection himself. For a moment as they walked, her fingers brushed against his knuckles by accident, and a charge went through both his spine and his cock so sharply and powerfully that he almost yelled. She gave him a look, and he hoped she’d taken it just as silly richboy jumpiness. Not wannajumpyourbonesiness.
He didn’t even want her, per se … agh, this must be how the ugly kids got laid at prom.
Pesky stopped short when he reached the open doorway. “Well, Mr Boyd, I suspect we’ve found the source of your rat problem there. But I’mma gonna have to come back, to do much about it: we’ll set some traps, set some poison out, should do you right for the time being.”
“I don’t get it,” Castle said. “What’s up?”
“Got yourself some stairs there,” Pesky said. “I’m a municipal employee, gotta call the housing inspector, have them make sure you’re all up to code before I can check it out myself. I gotta report that –” The man frowned, shrugged apologetically. “My guess is, it’ll cost you some good money and some good time. These old buildings, if you don’t keep em up they’re a right bitch to fix. Inspector’ll give you a call, chances are he’ll be out on Tuesday.”
“Wait,” Castle said. “Stairs? There’s only the one staircase upstairs. Christ, for that matter, there is no upstairs from here! Just the gatehouse, and there’s nothing above that.”
“Ayuh,” Pesky said, turning around and waving over his shoulder. “These stairs go down. You got yourself a whole nother basement here, Mr Boyd.”
#
If he’d done so carrying a baseball bat or a shotgun, he’d look like an ass.
It didn’t matter that there was no one to look like an ass to: that’s one thing his mother had been right about, that etiquette was a mask you put on for other people, and was little more than a list of instructions for servants to remember; breeding — what people used to mean by “manners” — was etiquette you’d follow even if no one ever saw you doing so. What’s important is what you do when you can’t impress. What’s important is the mask you wear in an empty room.
Be a man of breeding, Castle, he told himself. Not a man of etiquette. A man of breeding shows neither neck nor teeth, and hey, welcome to the circus. Welcome to the show.
The problem was that he felt like he was losing track of what was normal. Some things were obvious — he wasn’t insane, for Christ’s sake. You eat soup with a spoon. You drink coffee from a mug. You don’t wear your pants on your head. He hadn’t gone nuts. But there was a sense of normalcy that went beyond that — your ability to determine what would be normal in circumstances you had never encountered before. What would a normal person’s reaction be to a talking dog? Somehow you knew “fucking it” wasn’t the answer, even though you’d never run across a talking dog before. You understood the confines of normalcy. You had glimpsed the map of the world.
But maybe sometimes there be dragons.
Castle wasn’t positive he still had that sense, that map, that radar. So he decided to look at it as a movie. In a movie, what scene would he expect next? What would he expect our protagonist, Castle Finch — played by John Cassavetes, not because they looked anything alike but because Cassavetes was fucking badass — to do? John Cassavetes wouldn’t get scared of an unfamiliar room. John Cassavetes wouldn’t be spooked. John Cassavetes would just eat his fucking dinner while checking shit out, and that’s just what Castle was doing.
He hadn’t touched dinner.
Once he replaced the lightbulb in the overhead, it worked fine. How long had lightbulbs been standardized? He’d have to find out from Reynolds why this place didn’t show up on the plans — except Reynolds would mention it to Jonathan. Jonathan would probably find out eventually, because of the housing inspector … but there was no reason to make sure of it.
So he walked down the stairs with his dinner plate in hand and a flashlight at his side in case the light went out or he walked out of reach of it, and the shadows wound in spirals as he descended. Okay, so it was spooky. A little bit. The stairs went on for what felt like at least three stories, which probably meant only a little more than one. Spirals were tricky that way. What would John Cassavetes do?
John Cassavetes would rock the fuck out. John Cassavetes would kick out the jams. John Cassavetes wouldn’t take no shit from a machine.
“I’ve got a three foot dick,” Castle said, just to hear the calm assurance of his own voice. “I fuck reindeer for Christmas, and I piss hot lead. Anybody want a piece? I’ll knock you sideways and dance on your spine.”
Each step creaked as he stepped on it. Not a spooky creak so much as an annoying one, the creak of wood that hasn’t been used in a long time. There was dust all along the banister, spiderwebs interlaced like veils across its gaps, and the overhead light at the top of the stairs didn’t reach very far. At the bottom was just blackness, pitch dark, two basements down from a window and a dozen screams from home.
Okay now, Chuckles, Castle thought. Okay, now we don’t need to think about screaming, okay? We’re spooking ourselves out here. We’re on a fucking staircase underground. Big deal. There’s spiders down here, and probably rats, too. Hell, probably bats. You know what? So what. Better to go down and find out then to get surprised by some damn bat flying up into the kitchen and shitting all over the stew, right? We don’t need no shit from a machine.
He was five or six steps from where the shadows clumped together into darkness, and the light from far above him was weak, pale, waxy yellow like ear wax smeared across a pane of thick glass, and then it wasn’t even that: it was gone. Fuck, he thought, The light’s gone out, and even as he thought it, even as he fucking thought it, before the afterflash even escaped from his eyelids, he was sure it wasn’t true: he was sure that he hadn’t heard that distinctive pop you get when a lightbulb burns out, sure that it hadn’t flared the way they do, and even though it could have been the wiring — probably was the wiring — he was sure someone had turned it off. He was sure there was a qualitative difference to a light going out, and a light being put out, and just as sure he’d keyed in on it.
But his normalcy radar was broken, and all he was sure of was he wasn’t sure of anything today, and the darkness startled him so badly that he dropped the flashlight.
It was completely black on the stairs. Absolutely and utterly black. He kept waiting for his eyes to adjust. He stood perfectly still, lungs taut, heartbeat a wet snapping whip in his throat, and waited for the cool damp blackness to lose its sheen and bring a spiderwebby greyness.
But there was nothing. Nothing. He was underground. He was downbelow.
The flashlight rolled down the stairs. The head of it, the shade, whatever, was octagonal shaped, so it clacked as it rolled, and clunked every time it hit a new stair.
Clack-clack-clack … clunk.
Clack-clack-clack … clunk.
Clack-clack-clack-clack … clunk.
“Fuck reindeer,” he murmured, and even then his voice was too loud in the dark.
So here are your options, Castle. You can go forward into the Godknowswhat, and feel around for the flashlight. Or you can go back up the way you came, in total darkness. Are you a man, or are you a pussyshit?
He wasn’t even sure which option was more pussyshit, so he didn’t do anything. Even though he knew it wasn’t going to get lighter, the sun wasn’t going to rise, the lights weren’t going to come up, he still felt like he was waiting for them to: like he was on the edge of his seat, waiting for the credits to stop and the houselights to come on.
And then he heard the flashlight roll.
Clack-clack-clack … clunk.
Clack-clack-clack … clunk.
Two more steps. It had stopped altogether, had stopped rolling, and then it rolled down two more steps. He tried to imagine everything he knew about physics. He imagined Platonic flashlights in hypothetical staircases, and wondered, what if a stair was particularly gummed up with cobwebs? What if it rolled down unevenly, and used up some of its kinetic energy on getting over the speedbump of those cobwebs? Mightn’t it sort of hang there for a minute, until it finally fell again, and regain some energy with the inertia of the fall? Mightn’t it –
Clack-clack-clunk.
Clack-clack-clunk.
Clack-clack-clack.
It was going down the steps faster. How the fuck many were there? That was — he tried counting — eight? How far down did this staircase go before hitting a landing? Wait.
Clack-clack-clack.
It wasn’t falling.
Clack-clack-clack.
It wasn’t getting further away.
Clack-clack-clack.
He reached a foot in front of him, and felt the flashlight brush against it. Was sure of it. Felt the edge of the cylinder touch his shoe, felt it twist against it, methodically clacking. Something was rolling the flashlight. Back and forth. Back and forth.
He stumbled backwards, made it up a dozen or so steps just by the strength of his heart leaping out of his chest and yanking him along with it, dinner plate crashing with the sound of a chandelier dropped from a cliff, and when he fell on his ass and grabbed at the banister to pull himself up, he felt the hard plastic lump in his pocket, and remembered: the cellphone. The cellphone that lit up when you flipped it open, so you’d have an emergency flashlight when you got trapped in the downbelow. Or maybe that wasn’t why, but it’d work.
He very deliberately didn’t look behind him as he opened the cellphone, letting its light shine in front of him, green and sickly and wonderful. It was just enough to get him to the top of the stairs, where he bolted across the vestibule goddamn fucking foyer, into the corridor from the gatehouse, and into the fucking kitchen, where he closed the fucking door behind him and got a fucking bottle of gin from the back of the freezer, taking a throat-pulsing gulp from it like a runner with Gatorade.
“Ssscorpions in the sssstovetops,” he murmured to himself, “What would John Cassavetes do now? John Cassavetes would fuck himself a hooker, Chuckles, that’s what,” and his neck hurt from tension, and his ass hurt from falling, and he sat there with the piney taste of gin stinging his lips, waiting for it to be funny. “John Cassavetes would get a piece of ass.”