Bill Kte’pi’s Official Web Site

17.

“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?”