Downbelow Domino, Chapter Twelve
April 2nd, 200812.
Mia,
We are through.
We need to be, darling, don’t you see? There are lives for us to lead, and while apart we are two, together we are barely more than one. We are like candle wicks which, when brought together, join without doubling. Something of us — of each of us, dear — is lost to union. You have expressed such sentiments yourself, I request you to remember, and I think it is much of what you meant recently, speaking of masks. This is healthy for neither of us.
We will still see one another, naturally. I am not suggesting we exclude one another from our lives: only that we pursue individual lives, individual passions. You may have your boys: and I my women. I think I shall marry — the Van Der Lindens yet require an heir, you realize, and this alone would be reason enough for us to part, would it not?
I will add no more to this letter, neither color nor anecdote nor instruction, because I want my point made clear and plain. We cannot be together, love. I cast you out, and away from me.
Michael.
#
“Look straight ahead, please,” Tom McCall said, shining a light in Castle’s eyes like an optometrist. The ghost hunter — who didn’t call himself that — had sat Castle down at the dining room table and set up a lie detector, as the very first order of business in his investigation. The polygraph looked like a small, thin laptop, with tubey bits coming out of it connecting to sensors on Castle’s chest, neck, temples, and fingertips — in addition to the blood pressure cuff around his arm, and the rubber pneumographs wrapped around his chest to monitor his breathing. “Good, good,” McCall said. “Are you ready?”
“Sure,” Castle said. “Fire away.”
McCall sat down on the chair adjacent to Castle’s, with the laptop turned towards him but his attention on a set of index cards in his hands. His expression was friendly but neutral. The guy kind of reminded him of a short Robert Redford without the moviestar appeal: older, but in that zone of rugged good shape where he could’ve been anywhere between 50 and 70. An Irishman’s head of thinning orange hair, and wire-rimmed glasses that could’ve been thirty years old themselves.
The first “ghost hunters” to arrive at Domino wore suits, and wore them badly. They’d babbled about one thing or another, suggested seances and the like, and Castle hadn’t been impressed by them but had put their phone numbers aside. Granted, he didn’t believe in seances — but he didn’t believe in haunted houses either, right?
McCall, though, came alone, in jeans and a work shirt, looking as much like a carpenter as anything else. And instead of talking about readings or the spirits of the dead or psychic energy, he said the first thing he needed to do was administer a polygraph.
“What is your name?” McCall asked.
“Sebastian Castle Finch,” Castle said. There was no point in lying and skewing the exam. These things happened. “I also use the alias David Boyd.”
McCall didn’t react, just flipped to the next index card. “When were you born?”
“May 5, 1972. Boston City Hospital.”
“What was your favorite television show as a child?” McCall had warned him there would be some meaningless or nonsense questions, as controls.
“Superfriends and Spenser for Hire.”
“Who was your favorite Superfriend?”
“Black Vulcan. Well, no, Jayna. Zayna? Whatever her name was, the girl Wonder Twin with the Star Trek haircut. She was hot.”
“She the one who turned into animals?”
“Yeah. But I mean, that wasn’t why I liked her. She had this way of standing with, I don’t know, a hip cocked. It was feisty.”
“Feisty’s good. What did you like about feistiness?”
“You know, it was fun. Feisty girls were fun.”
“Uh-huh.” McCall kept that neutral expression. “Who were the girls you knew who weren’t feisty?”
Castle stared at him for a moment, feeling both psychoanalyzed and like things were being taken from him that he hadn’t said. “My mother, I suppose, Dr Freud. She had two modes: ‘on mode,’ you know, the hostess, smiling for the photographer; and the second mode, depressed in the tropics — not drunk, usually, but drinky enough to just lay there and mope. Wouldn’t call her feisty. But you probably know that much from the A&E Biography on her.”
“I don’t pay much attention,” McCall said, and shrugged.
“Yeah,” Castle said. “Sorry. I’m moody right now. Go on.”
“Ever fucked a goat?”
“Nope.”
“Your sister?”
“Hey.”
“I’m asking, have you fucked your sister? I know you two were close. Is it because you fucked her?”
Castle stared McCall down. “No. No, I never fucked my sister.”
McCall glanced at the laptop. “There we go. Had to see what the readings were like when I pissed you off. When was the last time you consumed a mind-altering substance other than alcohol, caffeine, or nicotine? Over the counter and prescription medications count.”
“This afternoon. And last night, or early this morning I guess.” Castle listed off the meds Dr Williams prescribed him, and McCall nodded absently as he wrote them down.
“And you say you don’t wear eyeglasses or contact lenses?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you colorblind?”
“No.”
“Hearing-impaired?”
“No.”
“How’s your night vision?”
“Decent, I guess. Average. I’ve never considered it unusual one way or the other.”
“Are you a religious man?”
“I was raised Catholic. I’m not exactly a church-goer, but I believe the basics, I guess. It isn’t a big part of my life.”
“Have you ever experienced any unusual sensations or inexplicable experiences while in prayer, at mass, giving confession, or receiving communion?”
That one merited thinking about, so Castle thought, and finally shook his head. “Not really. My first communion was a big deal, but I don’t think I felt differently than I did graduating high school, if you see what I mean. A secular big deal. I guess I should probably be scarred by the first time I confessed masturbating or something, but I really don’t remember it, so it can’t have been anything noteworthy. And I’ve never felt ‘the presence of God’ or anything like that, during prayer or anything else.”
“Never spoke in tongues, participated in faith healing or snake handling, been to a religious revival?”
“I’ve been to a couple religious revivals — televangelist type stuff. Fundraising. I was paid to do it. Not a religious thing for me.”
“All right, I’ll note that. Have you ever seen a UFO?”
“No.”
“Sasquatch, a lake monster, or other mysterious or long-lost animal?”
“No.”
“Have you ever experienced precognition?”
“No.”
McCall eyed him for a moment. “Never?”
“No.”
“You’ve never had a dream that came true? Thought about calling someone just before they called you? Known what someone was going to say before they said it? Predicted when a light would turn green? Gotten more than two numbers right in the lottery? Won a sports or other betting pool? Successfully called a bluff in a poker game? Won a game of roulette?”
“Well — a couple of those things, sure, once in awhile. I didn’t think of them as precognitive. I still don’t. Lucky guesses at best, coincidence.”
“Have you ever felt unusually blessed, special, or chosen? By God or other entities?”
“I’m Castle Finch, McCall.”
McCall only nodded. “Do you feel your dead father would approve of you?”
“… what?”
“Do you feel your father approves of you? Do you think he watches you, or is aware of you in any fashion? If not, how do you think he would feel about you if he was?”
They went down that road and similar ones for the better part of an hour, with McCall asking about a score of dead relatives and friends, and inevitably, about Rachael. “Do you think she went to Hell?” McCall asked mildly.
“No.”
“Because you don’t believe in Hell, or because you think she went to Heaven?”
“Neither. I don’t know. People like Rachael don’t go to Hell.”
“Rachael’s a Jewish name, isn’t it? Was she Jewish?”
“No. Episcopalian.”
“And what was she like, that would keep her out of Hell?”
Castle glared at McCall for a long moment before answering. “She wasn’t evil. She wasn’t hateful or hurtful. She wasn’t a saint, and she wasn’t an altruist, but she never knowingly did anyone serious harm.”
“That’s a lot of equivocating. Do you think being dead makes her angry?”
“I — yes. Of course. Of course she is.”
“Mm. You said your father was probably at peace, despite being murdered. You think Rachael’s angry because she overdosed on drugs? Do you think she’s angry at herself? Or with you, for giving her the drugs?”
“I didn’t give her the drugs. I don’t know where she got them. I didn’t pay attention.”
“Who is Rachael angry at?”
“Christ, I don’t know. I just figure, if I died at that age, I’d be pretty pissed.”
“Mmhm. She was only a little younger than your father was when he died, though. But I suppose you thought of him as older because you were a child.”
“I suppose I did, yes. You’re on thin ice, McCall.”
“Just doing my job. You’re aware that your face is one big bruise? The skin is almost completely purple where it isn’t red from broken blood vessels.”
“I — yes.” Castle touched a hand gingerly to his cheek, which ached even at the small touch. “I thought it might be. What happened was –”
“We’ll get to it. It’s connected to what I’m here to investigate?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago did it happen?”
“I’m — not completely sure. Late last night or early this morning. I didn’t have a watch on, and there were no windows.”
“Do you sleepwalk, Castle?”
“No, never.”
“Talk in your sleep?”
“Sometimes. I know a couple times I have when I’ve had a fever.”
“Most recent time?”
“I don’t know. I don’t –”
“Who was it who told you you’d talked in your sleep, the last time it happened?”
“Rachael.” As soon as McCall asked, Castle remembered. “We were in Barcelona. I hate Barcelona because it’s so fucking — I don’t know. It’s just so. It’s. Barcelona is the kind of place rich brats in their early 20s got strung out on coke and poetry when I was a rich brat in my early 20s. It’s like going back to high school, you know? Anyway. Rachael wanted to go to Barcelona because her youngest sister was living there for six months, one of those semester abroad type deals. She studies art or history or something.”
“And you came down with a fever?”
“Yeah. Rachael accused me of, I don’t know, willing myself sick. But yeah, I talked in my sleep. It pissed her off.”
“You were talking about her sister, huh.”
Castle stared at him. “How the hell did you know that?”
McCall smiled. “Lucky guess, intuition, whatever you like to call it. How long ago was that?”
“Two — no, three. Three years ago now.”
“Do bananas chew gum?”
“What? No.”
“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
“None.”
“How pinheads can dance on an angel?”
“Eleven.”
McCall eyed him.
“Or none. I don’t fucking know.”
“Do you hear voices?”
“No. Well — yes. Since moving in here.”
“The same voice every time?”
Castle thought about it for a moment. “No. Sometimes it sounds like my ‘inner’ voice. You know?”
“Sure. Other times?”
“Girl. Young girl, or one of those phonesex chicks who sounds young.”
“Phonesex chicks?”
“Well, she wouldn’t have to be a phonesex chick. But I mean the voice sounds young.”
“Does she tell you to do things?”
“To get out of the house. The first time I heard the voice, it was before we came in. Leave before you hear the lock click, she said. Leave while you can.”
“We?”
“Me and the buyer.”
“Uh-huh, all right. That the day you moved in?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“C’mon, it’s my fucking house. A little cold feet or something, what, you think I’m going to just bolt?”
McCall looked at him seriously. “I would have. Why’s it too late now? What’s with the ‘while you can’?”
“House arrest.”
McCall nodded like he’d known that. “What else has the voice told you to do?”
“That’s it. That’s all. But sometimes she says, I’m lost — I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t care.”
“Huh,” McCall said.
“Yeah, weird.”
“No, that sounds familiar. We’ll deal with it later. You said this is the same voice as on the music box? Where’s that?”
“Other room. I’ll get –”
“No, stay seated. We’ll deal with it later, too. Let’s move on to the phone call, the phantom phone call as it were.”
“Okay. Katrine was here. I told you a little about Katrine.”
“Let’s go over it again.” McCall nodded at the machine.
“Katrine’s a call girl. I’ve hired her to come over a few times. We’ve had sex, here in the house. We were watching the neighbor’s house through the telescope upstairs –”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why were you watching the neighbors’ house? Were you looking for something?”
“Teen daughter.”
“Ah.”
“The girl’s not visible, so Katrine says she’ll go over and fix that. I’m watching for awhile, and I get on the phone –”
“With one of your phonesex chicks.”
“Yes. Charity. Or at least –”
“Just go with what you thought was happening, for the moment.”
“Fair enough. I talked to Charity for a little while, and she sort of narrated what I told her was going on — because Katrine and the girl went up to the girl’s bedroom, where I could see her through the telescope. And Charity started calling the girl Mia.”
“The name from the letters.”
“Yes. She also — at the end — called me Sebastian. The things she was narrating started to happen. She said Katrine was going to kill Mia, strangle her from behind — and she called me Sebastian then.”
“You hadn’t told her your real name?”
“I tell everyone David. Like I want them to know?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“You’re not much fazed.”
McCall snorted a little, and sighed. “Look, is that bothering you? That I’m not wowed by your celebrity? I’ve worked for a lot of famous people, Castle. I worked on Poltergeist. I worked for Nancy Reagan when her husband was still President. Sorry if I can’t muster up more starstruckness.”
“Sorry, no — I’m just not used to it. It’s fine. Lets you focus on the work. And obviously you’ll be discreet.”
McCall snorted again. “So back to the work. Katrine killed the girl, or so it looked –”
“And I got freaked out, and then I saw that nothing I’d seen had happened: Katrine and the girl were just making out a little. And I started to ask Charity — and the phone just said ‘call failed.’ Like I’d never talked to her at all.”
“You still have the phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you cleared the memory or anything?”
“No. Unless it does that automatically or something.”
“It doesn’t. Have you spoken to Charity since?”
“No.”
“Well, we’ll talk to her later, then. And Katrine confirmed your second version of things, so to speak — the making out, but not the violence.”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe her?”
“I — what?”
“Do you think she might have killed the girl — or strangled her, anyway — and lied to you about it?”
“No, I — I saw them making out.”
“If you weren’t watching the whole time, she could have dragged the girl back onto the bed. And besides, you also saw her strangling her: you have to choose to disbelieve one version you saw, it seems. Why disbelieve the violent one?”
“It just doesn’t seem likely. Plus why would Charity know? And the call failed thing.”
“Okay.”
“That’s a pretty noncommittal ‘okay,’ McCall.”
“You get your chance to ask your questions later, Bucky. Right now it’s my ride. What was Katrine’s reaction?”
“She thinks the place is haunted. She thought I was a ghost before, and like, stuck in the house.”
“Does she know about the ‘downbelow’?”
“No.”
“Why do you call it that instead of basement?”
“It’s — well, you know, that’s what Reynolds called it first, come to think of it. The buyer. And — in the plans –”
“You haven’t seen the plans. Not any plans with the downbelow on them.”
Castle frowned. “No. No, you’re right, I haven’t.”
“So why do you call it that?”
“… I have no idea.”
“When did you start thinking of it that way?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you first saw it? When the animal control people opened the door?”
“Maybe. Yeah, I guess so.”
“Earlier?”
“Earlier than that I didn’t know it existed.”
“Okay.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I don’t know. Not really. I didn’t think so.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean? I need a reason not to believe in ghosts?”
“You’ve called how many ghost hunters? Yes, you need a reason.”
Castle sighed. “I was really young when my dad died. I’m famous for my dad dying. So, you know, I’ve met a lot of quacks. Frauds. Fortune tellers who’d be all ‘I have a message, your father isn’t dead,’ or ‘he watches you from beyond the veil,’ all that crap. Mediums. Seances.”
“Lots of people tried to use you, so you figured the crows were all black.”
“Yeah. What?”
“William James said, about spiritualists and mediums being frauds, that in order to demonstrate that not all crows are black, it isn’t necessary to show that no crows are black. Only to find one white crow.”
“Huh.”
“Did you notice any changes in temperature during the phone call?”
“No.”
“Was it hot or cold?”
“Neither. Closer to hot, I guess, once I got into it.”
“Notice any smells?”
“No.”
“Anything like goosebumps, or things brushing against you?”
“No.”
“Okay, let’s move on to the incident that resulted in your injury.”
“I wouldn’t call it an injury, exactly –”
“Castle, your face looks like a ripe grape. The swelling will come down in a couple days, I imagine, but you’re going to be black and blue for at least a week. You’re a walking black eye. You look like you crashed into a steel balloon, except your nose isn’t broken. That’s an injury.”
“All right, all right.”
“So this happened late last night or early this morning, you said. Before or after you went to sleep?”
“Before. I was up late. When I came upstairs, it was like four in the morning. I slept my full eight hours, like you said, but I’d only just gotten up maybe an hour before you got here.”
“So this happened after you’d already hired me for a consult.”
“Yes.”
“Before this happened, you already knew things in the house were pronounced enough to warrant professional investigation.”
“Yes.”
“Because of the phonecall?”
“Yes.”
“Was the phonecall a last straw, or would it have been enough in of itself?”
“… I don’t know, to tell you the truth.”
“That’s fine. That’s fine. So you came upstairs at four this morning. Why is it you aren’t sure what time it happened, then, more specifically than ‘late’? Couldn’t you estimate it within an hour?”
Castle hesitated. “Okay. Sometime between three and four, then.”
“No, don’t estimate because I’m telling you to. Why aren’t you confident about it?”
“I’m just not. I don’t know.”
“Let’s start at the beginning. What time did you go downbelow?”
“About — about three, I guess.”
“Okay, so that gives us a window, it must’ve been between –”
“No, I mean — three in the afternoon. After I called you. The last of the other guys had left, a Murray something –”
“Wick, Murray Wick. I know him.”
“Well, he didn’t seem any good to me, so I sent him packing and called you. Then I went downstairs.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been cleaning out down there. It looks like it hasn’t been touched in twenty years, maybe longer. I’m taking stock of what’s there, you know, antique furniture and all, before hiring a cleaning crew.”
“All right. You didn’t come back up for dinner?”
“No.”
“You got a nice kitchen there, and when you got me that glass of water you got it from the bottle in the fridge, not the tap. Fridge is stocked. Raw stuff, not bachelor stuff. You cook. And you didn’t come up for dinner?”
“No.”
“Didn’t come up to use the bathroom?”
“No.”
“Get a drink?”
“No. Well, there’s some soda down there, I had a can of that.”
“You had a can of soda in the basement.”
“Yeah. Wachusett Fizz. It’s this old soda they used to make in New England, hasn’t been made in decades. There’s a case of it down there, or was. I’ve had about four cans. Good stuff.”
“How long would you say you’d been down there when the incident occurred?”
“I don’t know. Honestly. I have no idea.”
McCall looked frustrated before that neutral expression settled itself back on him. “Okay. What had you done before it happened? Walk me through your afternoon and evening.”
“All right. On the middle floor — there’s three floors in the downbelow, right, I mean the middle or second one — there’s a kitchen. Not as big as the one up here, but it’s a full service kitchen, plenty of counter space. I figured, that was the most obvious place to start cleaning, organizing, whatever, because kitchens and bathrooms are pretty simple. You know from the start what’s supposed to be there and what it’s supposed to look like.”
“All right,” McCall said. “Why didn’t you start with one of the bathrooms? There are bathrooms down there without running water, right?”
“Yeah. I may have a plumber look at it eventually. But — I didn’t want to deal with the bathrooms.” They’d all had bathtubs. “I don’t know, kind of gross, right? Dealing with someone else’s bathroom? God knows what I’d find.”
“Sure,” McCall said. “So you were organizing the kitchen — or cleaning it?”
“Mostly organizing. Moving things into the central room — it’s like a hallway, but bigger, lobby-sized — so I could get a sense of what I was dealing with. There’s both an ice box and an electric fridge there, but the fridge is from the 1950s or so. Looks like something you’d see on Leave it to Beaver. Anyway, so I got that basically done. I had to do some cleaning as I went, just to keep from breathing in all that dust. And then I find these spiders. I mean …” Castle paused and shivered. “Lots of spiders. And I figured, you know, something like that was bound to happen.”
“Sure, animal control had warned you.”
“Right. And I don’t know yet what kind of structure there is blocking the downbelow from the dirt. For all I know, snakes and badgers and shit are crawling in and out all the time.”
“Sure. For all you know.”
“So I had this mega-death bug killer stuff. I’ve got lots of it, actually, different kinds — wasps, spiders, ants, termites. It isn’t a bug bomb, it’s this spray, but you have to move away from the area for a couple hours while it dissipates.”
“Sure, I know the stuff. Halfway between Raid and the hardcore shit. Used it on the summer porch last year for some wasps.”
“So there you go. I sprayed the hell out of the kitchen — I mean, I don’t have a bug phobia per se, but lots of spiders — dozens of them — that’s fucking freaky, right? So I did that, and then I went upstairs.”
“To the upmost level of the downbelow? The shallowest basement?”
“Right. The third floor is just storage rooms without much space, so I worked on the first floor for awhile, going through boxes. Most of it I’ll send to Goodwill or something. Clothes, old books in bad condition, china and silverware, all the stuff people accumulate.”
“Yep.”
“But, I mentioned letters. I found a few more letters, so I was reading through those. I sort of lost track of time, I think.”
“How many letters you read?”
“… not sure.”
McCall eyed him. “More than five?”
“Yeah.”
“More than ten?”
“Maybe.”
“You were reading them all, or skimming them?”
“Skimming some, reading most.”
“Less than fifty?”
“Yeah. Shit, yeah, less than fifty. Probably.”
“Uh-huh. Do you remember hearing anything in this time? Thunder, movement, voices, anything?”
“No.”
“Was it noticeably warm or cold?”
“No.”
“Strange smells?”
“A little of the bug spray stuff, I’d gotten it on my shoe or something.”
“What’s it smell like?”
“Sort of sweet, sort of sour, like if robots could sweat.”
“Can they?”
“Can who?”
“Can robots sweat.”
“No. And bananas still can’t chew bubble gum.”
“At what point did the house attack you?”
“I wouldn’t say it –”
“At what point did something hit your face?”
“I was going through boxes, and I realized because of the description in one of the letters — mentioning a writing desk with ravens carved into it — that one of the rooms in the downbelow was Mia’s. Or at least, it had her desk in it. I had noticed it before: it’s a gorgeous desk, the sort of one that goes for a few thousand dollars at Christie’s. Still in great shape as far as I can tell, just dusty — and even then it seems less dusty than most of the rest of the house. But it’s got these ravens carved into the legs and the shelf units around it, and the wood’s burned to make them black.”
“So it’s memorable. And you went to, to what, to go look at the room?”
“Yeah, to see — I don’t know, to see what of Mia I could see in it. Because I’d thought it was a child’s room. There are shelves of dolls, and the books are mostly Victorian kid lit — you know, Peter Pan, Wizard of Oz, Toad in the Hole or whatever.”
“Go on.”
“I put the letter down, and picked up the next one in the pile. I told you about the Michael and Mia situation, right?”
“What little you seem to know of it.”
“They had a thing. Not a very healthy thing, it sounds like. A jealous thing, both of them using the other, and using other people as well. At least one of them wasn’t very stable, and if it was only one of them, the other went along with it. I think Michael may have killed people.”
“I’ll find out what I can about him. You said you have Ricky Tremaine on it, too, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Ricky’s a good kid.”
“You know him?”
“I’ve worked with him before. Not on a referral basis. Ships in the night.”
“Small world. So, this letter I’ve got while I’m going to Mia’s room — Michael dumps her. He says fuck you, we’re through, we’re no good for each other. Maybe she’d gotten worse, or maybe he was getting better, something like that, I don’t know. Or maybe they were a makeup/breakup couple, they wouldn’t be the first.”
“Definitely not the last.”
“Amen. So that’s when it happened. I walked into Mia’s room — and wham.”
“You seem to think it’s because of the letter. Did you feel anything like goosebumps, static shock, sudden chills?”
“It was definitely colder. That’s what I started to say earlier. It got, I don’t know, twenty, thirty degrees colder. I could see my breath, and not just for a glimmer: it lingered.”
“Did you say anything out loud, or think anything communicative?”
“No.”
“What were your surface thoughts as you approached the room?”
“I was thinking about the letter, I guess, and thinking about Mia.”
“Are you attracted to her?”
“Yes, I am.”
“How many photographs have you seen of her?”
“Eighteen, nineteen. Around there. Unless some are of close relations, but I think they’re all her.”
“Do you feel affection for her?”
“I don’t know her.”
“Were you angry when you found out Michael had dumped her?”
“I — I didn’t know either –”
“What was your first emotional response?”
“Anger. Yes. I don’t know why. But I was angry with him for abandoning her.”
“Were you tired? You must have been tired.”
“I don’t remember feeling tired.”
“Did you see anything?”
“No. Only the ravens.”
“What?”
“The ravens. Just as I got to the door of the room, the ravens on the desk caught my eye. They’re all in slightly different poses, see. I was thinking about the desk, so I noticed the ravens. And then I stepped in the door.”
“Yes. Did you hear anything?”
“Oh yes.”
“What did you hear?”
“‘Don’t leave me. Don’t ever leave me again. Don’t ever leave me alone.’ Like shouting. Screaming. Begging.”
“In your head?”
“No, no. It was coming from the room. And then it pushed me.”
“What did it feel like?”
“Like the air just shoved back at me. Like a hand over my face, pushing me. You know how a fan feels? Like a really strong fan feels like a cushion, the air coming from it? And the air from an engine, even though it’s blowing like a fan it’s warm? It was like that. Like a warm cushion that just — pounded me. Pounded the shit out of me. Like the room had balled up a fist and socked me with it. I remember feeling my feet leave the ground, and the next thing I knew — this’ll sound cliche –”
“That’s fine.”
“– I landed on the other side of the hallway, on my ass. Which still hurts like hell, so thanks a lot for leaving me in this chair so long.”
“We’re almost done. So you think the room was angry at you — or lashed out at you — because of the letter.”
“Seemed like a pretty definite connection.”
McCall sat back for a moment, tapping a pen on the side of his index cards. “One more thing, and then I’ll check the results of the polygraph. If it’s up to snuff, I’ll take the case.”
“All right.” Castle frowned, not having realized McCall’s taking the case was conditional. “What’s the ‘one more thing’?”
McCall pushed a sheaf of papers towards him. “Sign these. Read them over as carefully as you like. They’re a contract. Whatever the result of my investigation — yea or nay — you agree, contingent on my agreeing to take the case, never to publish or broadcast anything related to its results. You may not make public anything that constitutes product of my investigation, although you are free to discuss it with friends and family. You may not profit from my investigation, such as by using it as the basis for a ‘haunted house tour’ or other such crap.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Those hoaxes and frauds you were worried about, Mr Finch? They work both ends of the table. If we both know there’s nothing I can do to help you make money, you’ve got a lot less reason to lie to me.”
Castle pondered for a minute, trying to figure out how this could be a bad thing for him, but it seemed like something he should like. He read through the contracts — whatever the sum-ups, there was no way he’d sign anything without reading it first — and signed them. “Sounds good to me,” he said.
“Great,” McCall said, smiling. “By the way, ever kill anyone?”
“What? No.”
McCall nodded as he unhooked the machine, respooling the wires and pneumographs.