I’m going to serialize another free novel here, a haunted house story I wrote in the summer of 2004, largely while watching softball whenever there wasn’t a Red Sox game on.
This was not the first novel I wrote. It wasn’t even the fourth. But it was the first one written in what I think of as my current arc as a writer, which is a lot of horseshit you don’t need to worry about except to know this: I still feel like, and still write like, the writer who wrote this novel. I would not take a substantially different approach with it if I wrote it now. I might be less likely to set it in New England, but I think that was a necessity here; Southern wealth and Boston Brahmin wealth are just not the same beast.
I was immersed in this novel to a greater degree than the others I’d written, and anyone who knew me then would probably confirm: I woke up every morning and asked myself, what can I do to Castle Finch today? What horrible thing can I inflict on him?
So this is chapter one, in which the fortunate son of a wealthy political family is consigned to house arrest in a strange, strange place called Domino. This is a dirty, dirty book, with horrible people doing horrible things, and if your parents were to complain about you reading it, they would undoubtedly be in the right.
1.
“I’m a big fan of your family,” Reynolds said, and Castle nodded vaguely as the buyer — he actually called himself that, a buyer, not a realtor or agent or salesman or anything less L.A. — unlocked the gate at the head of the driveway. It was one of those statements you couldn’t readily answer, but there was no reason to be impolite about it. “Have been since I was a kid. I mean, I didn’t live here last time your uncle ran, but I would have voted for him if I did.”
“Me too,” Castle said. “I’d like to get someone who can mow that, take care of it, you know. Keep the hedges trimmed, too. Not obsessively, but enough to keep everything in good shape.”
“Sure, sure,” Reynolds said, head bobbing at the top of his silk-lined suit, which was too warm for the weather and had made sweat bead on his neck and below his chin. “There’s a service I’ve used before. Preferred times?”
“How do you mean?”
“Some people don’t like it being done on the weekend, when they’re home. Or they want it done only on Sundays, so they can keep an eye on them, make sure no one’s loafing. Like that.”
“Fridays. Friday afternoons, around three.” The sound of the mower would remind him of home, when he was in high school, junior high, whatever, and the grounds crew would be mowing everything and sweeping the grass away so everything was perfect before any weekend parties at the estate. “Make sure they sweep the trimmings away, don’t leave that for me to do.”
Reynolds bobbed his head again as he fiddled with the huge brass ring of keys, like a warden’s. The ring was decorative, brass, probably something he’d picked up in a Caribbean equivalent to Brookstone’s: it was carved like a snake swallowing its tale, but he kept getting keys caught on the teeth.
Don’t go in, Castle thought, as Reynolds found the proper key. Leave before you hear the lock click. Leave before you hear the lock click. Don’t go in, you can still leave. Reynolds won’t know what to do. You can go. Leave before you hear the lock click.
Ridiculous random anxiety, perfectly natural. The “voice” in his head, it didn’t sound like his so much as the memory of a woman’s voice. The way you imagine someone would sound saying something they haven’t: that compromise between the native voice of yourself, and the imported voice of your memory, as though that memory was cooled down by the climate of thought. That made some sense, too, although he couldn’t bring himself to call it natural.
The door opened smoothly, with no creak, no whine, no scuffle, and Reynolds nodded like he’d proven a point. “When I came by for an inspection, there was a squeak there. Told em to fix it. See, we’ve got good people on this. You make sure to mention that to your uncle.”
“Sure will.”
“Great. Well, Mr Finch, welcome to Domino.”
Reynolds stepped out of the way with a little bow, and Castle walked into the house, his messenger bag jostling against the doorway. He was used to wider doors, the ridiculous double-sized doors of the estate and summer home. The villa was smaller, but he’d never liked the villa. Well, he’d liked it fine, but ever since the rumor that that maid’s cousin’s boy was his, he’d stopped going.
The foyer was wide, floored in marble in a black and white pattern that wasn’t quite checkered: white squares spread out with irregular placements of black pips, suggesting the house’s name, inscribed above the doorway on both sides, although the ivy covered most of the writing on the exterior side. The windows to either side of the door were frosted, rippled glass, and looked old. At Castle’s glance, Reynolds nodded. “1920s,” he said. “The original glass. Not the whole house — some of the windows were damaged in the 80s, Hurricane Gloria. I can have those replaced, though, with something of the appropriate age.”
“That’s fine,” Castle said. “I mean, it’s fine like it is. I was just curious.” He moved out of the way so Reynolds could close the door, shutting away the distant sounds of traffic and a neighbor’s lawnmower, the radio playing in a driveway up the street from Domino’s cul-de-sac, where teenage girls too young or too old for their shorts and tank-tops had been washing a sports car, the sound of boats on the lake across the back end of the property. “So everything’s in order?” He started to open a door, then realized it must be to the coat room.
Reynolds made a show of demonstrating the coat room, of course, with its brass and iron hooks and so on, and Castle nodded to a lighter-colored area of the wall just outside it, a rectangle the size of a picture frame. “What was here?” he asked. “A painting?”
“A portrait of the previous owners,” Reynolds said. “It’s in the third-floor storeroom now, I believe there’s a box marked ‘VDL effects.’ Van Der Linden. It’s yours, of course, like the rest of the house; I just assumed you wouldn’t want it hanging.”
Castle nodded, and pictured his head bobbing like Reynolds’s. He shoved past the “buyer,” more rudely than he meant to, and found a living room on the other side of the door, furnished like something his mother would have had done over the course of a December, while Christmasing in Old Europe. Lots of white, but not too much. Just enough green — not bright, not forest, and God help us not the avocado green of khakis and 1970s refrigerators, but a respectable jade to tone the white down, touches of blue in the shadows, a splash of red here and there in the pillows and paintings. The windows overlooked the east side of the front lawn, with the stone wall and hedges blocking any view of the world beyond that trapezoid of grass and flower.
He sat down in one of the couches the movers had brought, which looked strange here in this unfamiliar house, instead of in his wing of the estate. It’d sat in what he’d thought of as his telephone room, a long windowless room insulated from both the rest of the house and from his bedroom, so he could make business calls — or personal ones — without anyone he’d left in bed overhearing. There’d been a Mondrian on the wall opposite the couch; it wasn’t here now. The family had probably reclaimed it.
“Mr Finch?” Reynolds asked, and yeah, he was a fan: his voice had that weird smiling-dubious edge to it, like he couldn’t get over the novelty of the last name, the way people sounded when they talked to the Kennedys, Rockefellers, Hiltons. And the Finches.
“Come on and have a sit, Reynolds,” Castle said. “Your grandfather ever say that? ‘Have a sit’? Mine did. That and ‘have a catch.’ Not ‘play catch,’ but ‘have a catch.’” He felt suddenly wordy and nervous, the way you do when you make pointless, porous small talk with orderlies before surgery.
Reynolds seated himself — he didn’t have a sit, he seated himself — in the high-backed armchair that must have come with the house, looking as at ease as a lawyer or a publicist. “Not that I remember, Mr Finch, but I think I remember hearing that in Field of Dreams, don’t I?”
“Yeah, good ear. It’s an upstate New York thing. Stop calling me Mr Finch — I know this sounds trite, but that’s my uncles, or my grandfather. When people call me that, I always think it’s because they can’t remember which Finch I am. It’s Castle.”
“Sure. Of course. Wouldn’t you care for a tour, Mr Fi– Castle?”
“Mr F’Castle, I like that. Like fakakta. That’s another thing my grandfather used to say: ‘fucking fakakta,’ and then he’d say, ‘pardon my Jewish.’ This is my mother’s father, all of this — Edmund Fitzpatrick Castle. His mother’s father was Jason McDonald Fitzpatrick. Craziest most fucking fakakta, pardon my Jewish, family tradition I can think of: middle-naming a son after the mother’s maiden name. Cause it passes down on the mother’s side, see what I mean? Till you get to Sebastian Castle Finch.” For God’s sake, Cas, stop fucking talking. “Anyway. I just wanted to, like, inaugurate the house. Or christen it, I guess.” He opened the messenger bag, which held very little, just things he wouldn’t trust to movers, and pulled out a glass bottle wrapped in cotton, putting it down on the coffee table. “This is a one hundred and fifteen year old bottle of tequila.”
“Wonderful, Mr Fi– Castle — if you’d like to smash it on the door, then, or … ?”
“I don’t think you heard me, Reynolds. This is a one hundred and fifteen year old bottle of tequila.”
“Oh, I’m sorry — I –” Reynolds’s eyes widened and he broke character again, like he had with the ‘I’ve always been a fan’ bit. “Are you shitting me?”
“I’m not shitting you. Don Ceonobia Sauza made this himself — or oversaw it being made, anyway. The first truly gifted, truly artisanal, tequila maker.” He unwrapped the bottle, which was half-full. “Tequila’s not usually aged much, not more than a few years. It’s not like Scotch. Not something you leave laying around, usually. But this one’s special.”
Reynolds leaned forward in the chair, a triangle of arms on thighs. “A family heirloom?” he asked.
“Mm,” Castle said, nodding. “My grandfather’s — the other grandfather. Preston Finch. He gave this to me when I turned 21. It’d been my father’s, of course, but — you know.”
“Sure,” Reynolds said. “Real sorry about that.”
“Well, I was only a kid. You can get through a lot as a kid. Anyway, Preston had had a drink of this with my pop, right, on his twenty-first, and then gave the bottle to him. Did the same with me.”
“Where’d Prest — where’d your grandfather gotten it?”
“That I don’t know. His father, maybe. Except –” Castle stopped, shook his head. Except he’d always thought Preston was the one to bring it into the family. That the bottle had been given to him by someone else, an Outsider. “– except I’m not sure. Never thought to ask. I was happy to be getting it, you know? It could have gone to my uncle, maybe should have.”
“You are the firstborn, Mr Finch. The firstborn of the firstborn.”
“Firstborn of the firstborn of the second-oldest, at that — Preston’s older brother died as an infant, back when that could happen to rich people.”
“Huh,” Reynolds said, and it was clear that he’d exhausted his ability to make non sequitur smalltalk with his employer. Or client. Or whatever.
“Get us some glasses, Reynolds?” Castle asked, and the man nodded, disappearing through the swinging doors to whatever lay beyond, and a kitchen somewhere beyond that.
It was a strange thing — a strange thing within a strange thing — being alone in a room in a house he didn’t know. He’d seen the foyer and a living room. More was implied, but unseen; the exterior had suggested only shape, eventual dimension. Until explored, it was all mystery: and a perfect time to drink.
Leaning back, he stared at the paint. In a room you aren’t inured to, walls are fascinating, in that old sense of fascination: to enslave the faculties and deprive of the power of escape. He’d grown up on the estate, which had been the same — albeit with the inevitable expansions, modernizations, renovations — for four generations. You get so used to the stylized flowers against the purple stripe on the cameo-colored wallpaper, or the brushstroked ferns over faded tan, or the mottling like barnacles on an otherwise white wall discolored imperceptibly with cigarette smoke and food steam, that you forget about them entirely. You decorate your home for other people, because you never see it yourself except when you aren’t happy with it.
When you aren’t happy with your home, it may as well be death.
In this room, that perfect green hugged the walls where they hit floor and ceiling, with perfectly squared-off, perfectly regular, crayon-blue crosshatching near the corners, rising up from the green like ray-traced waves. But along parts of the wall, where the sun must hit during the afternoon and quicken the fade, he could see hints of other things, old paint, old patterns laying beneath like shadows on the other side of thin paper, or glow reddening a flashlight-hugging mouth.
Maybe he’d get someone to strip the paint. See what was underneath. Maybe he’d peel the plaster off the wall. Maybe he’d knock the wall down entirely, and replace it with a giant fishtank. Maybe he’d knock the whole place down and see what was inside the rubble, sift through it like a prospector like Armor Finch had supposedly been. Maybe he’d start with his bare hands.
There was a tear, right there, where the window met the wallpaper; where the surface met the sand, where the ocean met the shore. A peel, a curl, something he could take hold of and pull. He could peel the wall open, and then find that weak wet spot in the plaster and dig. It was the kind of thing that would take time, like those Guinness book guys who ate trees or counted birds, but he could do it: it would be engrossing, fascinating, like when he took apart telephones and electronic football games as a kid. Never the baseball or basketball ones, he wanted to play those: just football.
It was something that would take a lot of time.
He could take the whole place down, with nothing but his hands.
“Here we go, then, Mr Finch,” Reynolds said, startling Castle. He jumped a little; his fists had been clenched, and his jaw too, a bit of cheek bleeding between deaf teeth. Reynolds put the glasses down on the table, two rocks glasses made out of smoky glass — no, Castle saw, not glass at all, but smoky quartz.
“Nice,” he said, picking his up to feel the heft. It had a satisfying feel to it, the way thick glass does, but a roughness too, and a solidity. He put it back down again, and filled both the glasses — not all the way, but a good shot and a half, maybe two shots. “Don’t shoot it, sip it. But don’t be afraid of it, either. Drink it like a good Scotch.” Reynolds started to say something, and Castle realized he’d probably never had a good Scotch. “Drink it like coffee after dinner.”
Reynolds smiled at that, and took exactly the right size sip. Eight or nine expressions passed across his face before he said anything. “Jesus fuck,” he said. “Mr Castle, that’s fucking great!”
“Damn right it is.” Castle took a sip of his own, smoky and sweet like burning sun-dried oranges with that flavor that doesn’t taste like anything but really, really good tequila. They took turns, watching each other drink, getting a vicarious thrill out of it as aftertastes lingered, and when Castle refilled their glasses, Reynolds didn’t complain.
Over the course of an hour, they drained the bottle of Ceonobia Sauza’s finest moments.
#
“Drank it all,” Reynolds said mildly, pointing to the bottle. His finger hovered in the air, and either it or the room was shaking.
Castle nodded. “Meant to. It’s all right. No Finch heir. Not from me. Nobody give it to.”
“Yep,” Reynolds said. “Drank it all.”
They both laughed.
#
“So I gotta give you the tour,” Reynolds said. “That’s what I have to do. For a job. Today.”
“Yep,” Castle said. “Drank it all.”
“C’mon, Cas,” the buyer said. “Let’s go. There’s other rooms. Over there. That aren’t in this one.”
“Good place for em,” Castle nodded, and sighed from the corner of his mouth. He wasn’t as drunk as he wanted to be. Wasn’t as drunk as if he hadn’t shared. He didn’t think Reynolds was, either. But it was easier to be shitfaced. “Lead the way, Pronto Tonto.”
Through the swinging doors, Reynolds led him through a hallway where pictures had clearly hung once and pale squares stood now. “Where my paintings at anyway?” Castle asked.
“I don’t know, sir? Did you direct the movers to hang them?”
He thought about it and shook his head. “They must be with the other unsorteds. Assorteds. Sordids. In one of the sordrooms. Storerooms.”
“I can have some boys sent by to give you a hand with that kind of thing, if you like.”
Castle waved him off without actually saying no.
“In any case,” Reynolds continued, “that door there leads to one of the three first-floor lavatories. There’s another in the downbelow, too — the basement, I mean, nothing down there but the bathroom and cold storage — and the others are off of the sous kitchen — it was a laundry room more recently, I think, but my documentation calls it a sous kitchen — and the other living room, this one’s reflection.”
“How do you mean?”
“Parts of the house are built symmetrically. You can bisect it at the foyer; the third floor is perfectly symmetrical, the second mostly so, the ground floor a little less because of the kitchen. I’d have to check the plans to find out if that’s original or not, if you want to –”
“No no, just curious. Christ, Reynolds, you sound like I’m Nancy Reagan, walking in with a brand-new White House in mind.” He saw in a glance that that’s exactly what Reynolds had expected, and added, “Just say no.”
“Well, we have the dining room here as you see — that table isn’t original, as such, but it is period.”
“All right. Anyway, lead on.”
They walked through the kitchen and sous-kitchen, the secondary dining room and the “service nook,” where hired help would eat. The house wasn’t big enough to house servants as well as a family, but some of the previous owners had employed day servants, and occasionally a live-in maid or butler. Castle gave the bathrooms a cursory, tense inspection, and nodded; caught Reynolds watching the nod once, before looking away and continuing on his spiel.
The other side of the house wasn’t just similar to the half they’d started in: it was a perfect reflection, down to the placement of the furniture and window treatments, and the colors were so exactly matched that Castle found himself looking for the bit where the wallpaper curled near the window frame. It was there.
“What the fuck,” he said, and Reynolds chuckled.
“The realtor I arranged this sale from pointed out that wallpaper curl to me. It’s deliberate. Trompe l’oeil or whatever, right? Only … not quite that, but you know what I mean. But that’s nothing. Look at this.”
He opened part of the wall — it was a cabinet door, Castle realized, and remembered seeing something similar in the other living room — to display a bookcase. Castle knew what he was looking for immediately, and found it: all of the jackets were reversed. The print was backwards, and presumably the pictures too, for those that had them.
“Shit,” he said, and grabbed a copy of what would have been The Beautiful and Damned on the other side. The text inside was reversed, too. “That’s kind of creepy.”
“Right?”
“I guess I know which half of the house we’re on. The wrong one.”
Maybe Reynolds was creeped out, too, because that hastened his step, and they took one of the staircases up to the second floor — bedrooms, a nursery (on the “wrong” side), and so on, and then the third floor was mostly storerooms, a small bedroom for a live-in servant, and a loft with an enormous skylight and telescope.
“Wow,” Castle said, looking at both. The telescope was old, but would have cost an arm and a leg when it was new; he didn’t know much about them but could tell that much. Maybe shopping was what he knew about, pricing. “Whose was this?”
“Previous owner’s, I believe. Maybe the one before that. Check this out.”
He stood by the telescope, gestured up above him at the skylight, and shook his head. And then pointed to his sides.
The scope sat so that it could swivel easily between the two windows, which were set low on the wall. The perfect angle to peek down over hedges and walls at neighboring houses, it looked like.
“Oh, you’re shitting me,” Castle said.
Reynolds grinned. “I don’t know for sure. On that side? There’s newer construction, and some hedge work I don’t think was there twenty years ago. You can’t see anything. On the other, though? Right into a couple of bedrooms and bathroom. They’ve got, uh, a teenage daughter.”
“Oh yeah?” Castle asked, with a little nudge in his voice.
“Hey, she’s like sixteen. I’m just saying. I was checking out the telescope.”
“Notice you didn’t put it away in the storeroom like the photos.”
“And that service is free of charge, Mr F’Castle Finch.”
“Great. Listen, you wanna point me back to the nearest bathroom? The tequila, you know.”
Reynolds led him back down, pointed him to the bathroom, and when Castle opened the door, his hands went cold and fleshy. He steadied himself, did his thing, and when they finished the tour, he steeled his voice and said, “You know, I think I said on the work order to remove all the bathtubs. I don’t take baths. I never take baths. Just showers.”
Reynolds stayed silent for a moment, and finally nodded. “Yes, sir. Your uncle countermanded that order.”
“He did what?”
“Sir, you have to understand. Your uncle purchased this house and the land. He hired me, and the other workers. The deed is in the name of the Finch family, not you specifically, and Senator Finch — well, he’s the voice of the family, isn’t he.”
He’d like to be, Castle thought. If a couple of folks would have the good sense to finish their time and die. “This is my fucking house, isn’t it.”
“I suppose you could hire someone to come in and do it,” Reynolds said, and there was a tone in his voice suggesting he thought that would be a bad idea.
Uncle Jonathan must have talked to people. Just the right people. Not enough for word or rumor to do anything, just the minimum number of words he’d need to keep Castle from getting the bathtubs yanked out. Goddamn him. Goddamn him and the Finch fucking family and the Finch fucking legacy and the Common fucking wealth of Massa fucking chusetts.
“Listen,” Reynolds said, not looking at him. “Let me show you another room. I was saving this for last.”
“Yeah. All right.” Fucking bastard, Castle was thinking, I never should have given you any of my fucking tequila.
Reynolds brought him back into the reflected living room, and down the hallway that would have led to the kitchen on the other side. “I told you it’s not a perfect reflection.” Sunlight streamed down, and the warm, unregulated air of the outdoors. The “room” was a garden, not the vegetable kind, but the kind with rocks and bushes and flowers and whatnot.
Castle stood in the doorway, frowning. “Weird. Am I going to have to hire a gardener? How do you get to this from the outside?” The exterior walls were still there, windows and all, enclosing the garden, with the ceiling open to the sky. It’s like someone had destroyed whatever used to be there and built the garden in what had been a kitchen, or living room, or whatever.
“You don’t,” Reynolds said. “See … it’s still the house. You’re still in the house.” Castle hated him a little, but nodded as he walked down the path. “Outdoors but still inside. I guess that was the idea. Anyway, it irrigates automatically — not even electronic or anything, it’s something set up a long time ago, runs off the pipes — and everything is hardy, low-maintenance stuff. That’s why you don’t see your roses, your irises, things like that. You don’t need to know anything about gardening, as long as you don’t take to pissing on the daffodils.”
“Mama put my guns in the ground,” Castle murmured.
“Cause I did what I did before love came to town,” Reynolds finished for him, wrongly.
“Thanks. Thanks for showing me this.” Sunlight streaming down, something of a breeze trickling from three stories of sky above him.
“Sure,” Reynolds said. “I mean like you said, it’s your house.” He stood there, like that was a meaningful sentence, and when Castle blinked uncomprehendingly, he added, “Not your uncle’s house. You know?”
Uncle Jonathan had wanted the garden destroyed or locked off, then. And Reynolds, or someone, hadn’t done it. “You’re not a bad guy, Reynolds,” Castle said. “How much did they tell you?”
They walked out of the garden, and Reynolds retrieved his coat. “All I know is that I’m being paid a lot of money to forget today, and to forget the last four months of work. My wife thinks I’ve been working on buyouts for people who want to build a mall. It’s good money, Castle, but there’s one other thing.”
They stood by the door, the front door, with Reynolds on one side of the threshold and Castle on the other. Sunlight on one side, and incandescent on the other. You could almost hear a car stereo down the street, past the gate, almost smell the cut grass, almost see the Wendy’s on the corner down the street some ways. “What’s that, Reynolds?”
“I’m being paid a lot of money to press a button when I leave,” he said. “And maybe I’m not very good at my job. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe I don’t need to press that button just yet. Maybe I forgot, is what I’m saying. Maybe I just get in my car, and I press the button in an hour, because Senator Finch will know if I never press it at all. But maybe I press it in an hour. Maybe I’ve got no idea what’s going on here in the meantime.”
Castle sighed. There went the pretense. “Look around, kiddo.” Reynolds had to be ten years older than him, but it didn’t matter. He was a child in the way of the Finches. “See any bodyguards? See any cops? See anyone stopping me, for the last few hours, from overpowering you and making a run for it?”
“… no.”
“Because they don’t need to be here. I appreciate the offer — I know you mean well — but if that’s how things went down, we’d both be dead by tomorrow.”
Reynolds flinched.
“Dead,” Castle repeated. “And you’re being paid not to know that, too. You go on being a fan of my family. You go out and vote in November, and you vote Finch, and in four years you can vote Finch-McKittrey for President. Go ahead: hang on to that name, McKittrey, he’s a Congressman out of Chicago and he’ll be my uncle’s running mate.”
“How do you know that?” Reynolds asked, off-balance. “I mean — it’s not even — it’s years before they’d even announce –”
“Because I’m Castle fucking Finch, Reynolds, heir to the kingdom and the glory forever. Press the button.”
Reynolds reached into his pocket, and nodded after a moment. A light neither of them had noticed, over the doorjamb, turned from unnoticeable to red. “It’s done,” he said.
“Great,” Castle said. “Go on. I hold nothing against you. Okay? You don’t have to lose any sleep. Spend your money in peace. You got nothing to do with this.”
Reynolds left, slowly, hesitantly, so Castle had to close the door.
He kept thinking he could feel it, down there in his ankle, wherever they put it. The chip, the tag, what the fuck ever it was.
That light glowed red, red, red, and wouldn’t go away. Jonathan hadn’t even bothered to tell him what would happen if he tried to leave the house, because Senator Jonathan Thomas Finch wasn’t the kind of man who needed to explain things like that. You looked at him, and you knew. Just like Castle knew there was no way to get out alive.
He pushed the door closed, and it snapped into place with a click of the lock.