Downbelow Domino, Chapter Twenty-One
April 9th, 200821.
In a house full of hundreds of precise clocks, Castle had no idea what time it was. None of them seemed to say the same thing; the digital readouts in the seconds columns weren’t even ticking off at the same speed. His three cell phones told him three different things, and calling the “at the tone, the time will be” lady gave him different results every time. It was just past dawn. It was the middle of the afternoon. It was last week.
Whatever time it was, it took probably hours for him to clean up the bodies from the living room. He didn’t know what else to do with them. Every time he dialed 911, he got a Muzak version of “Ain’t We Got Fun.” Anyone else he could call, they’d think he did it. Besides, cleaning them up was a way to convince himself they were real — that McCall and the last two servants of Domino had been killed, that blood had soaked through a carpet worth five digits and splattered all that tasteful green.
He put them in Hefty bags first, triple-bagged, but they were still so wet, and the bags started to squelch whenever he shifted one or added another piece of someone.
So he laid sheets of plastic down on the carpet, since it was already ruined anyway, and put the bags on top of the plastic and hastily filled them with what he could find — fingers shorn off of hands, pieces of face, larger body parts that hadn’t been broken or shattered or slurped upon — and then started making trips up to the second-floor bathroom, the one with the bathtub that he hadn’t had a chance to board back up.
The blood, he thought, would be the issue. So he’d run a bath, rinse as much of the blood as he could, and let everything … drain.
There had to be a limit to how much blood there was, right?
Eventually it would all swirl away.
Bag by bag, cursing whenever something dripped, he brought the piece upstairs to rinse in the clawfoot tub, leaving the drain unplugged to sluice everything off, and eventually he started switching pieces out — taking soggy, wrinkled hands and legs out of the tub, squeezing more pink from them, and putting them in fresh Hefty bags to make room for another torso or head that needed washing.
Probably hours passed.
He used wire cutters to cut the carpet into smaller squares and dumped them in the largest of the washing machines, the one that handled blankets and towels and the like, running several cycles with lots of bleach and detergent, being careful not to overload the unit.
Blood splatters cleaned off the walls easily enough, but a number of paintings — and in some cases, just the frames — had to be disposed of, as did the bulk of the living room furniture. He envisioned several different plans — he could chop it all up into smaller, innocuous pieces, and either burn them — bit by bit — over a long period of time, in one of the fireplaces. Or he could add an extra bag of trash to the outgoing, every day until it was all gone.
Eventually he decided that letting the blood leave the house in any form — even as smoke — was risky. He soaked up the puddles where he found them, and dried the damp spots, and covered everything in tarps left over from when he had moved in, before moving everything up to one of the third-floor storerooms. By the time he was done, every muscle felt like stretched catgut, he’d taken off his shirt after soaking it through, and sweat made the coppery stains he’d accumulated run rusty.
Probably more hours passed.
Eventually the living room was bare but for the few pieces of furniture which were easily cleaned — the windowside table of glass and metal, the well-varnished coffee table, the mahogany bookcase which caught only a backsplash — and a few bundles of towels he’d add to the washer once it had recovered from the several loads of carpet. At the moment, it had been so overworked it was painfully hot to the touch, and he didn’t want to break it at such an inconvenient time.
He wondered if he might be in shock.
The garden was already dug up, so he buried the body parts there, in and among the carefully placed rocks and the decorative flowers. The garden was indoors, so there was no danger of a neighbor dog digging up McCall’s skull or Andrea Jenkins’ femur. It was outdoors, which would diffuse the smell. He lit half a dozen 72-hour citronella candles and made a mental note to keep replenishing them.
The garden was the only place where he could find natural light or so much as a hint of the outdoors. Domino was sealed up, with the windows looking in on themselves and the loft telescope gone blind, but here the roof was open to the sky. It was light out when he was done, the light of a dawn caught red-handed, and he fell asleep with the shovel sticking into the ground next to him, soil prickling his cheeks, black plastic shining from patches he hadn’t covered up well enough.
#
Sometime in the night, with the half-conscious half-rational fidgets like those of rolling over in his sleep or turning out a light after dozing off accidentally, he crawled down the hole to the downbelow, crawled down the rabbit hole to Mia’s bedroom. His face was chafed, his nails torn and ragged, and his muscles badly missed deep-tissue massages and eucalyptus oils, with all of their tension gathering up in the small of his back like a hot knot of pig-iron.
In a room like a little girl’s, still sharp with the tang of anticoagulants and protein-dissolving cleansers, he slept a deep, comforted sleep, and many times in the day and the night that followed he would have woken up if not for the calming, soothing touch of a hand on the back of his neck, and of cool clean skin against his filthiness.
In the arms of another he slept, and perchance dreamt, all the while the mirrors unquiet like many frantic eyes.
#
The wedding reception of Michael Van Der Linden and Samantha Montgomery took the form of a masquerade ball, a tradition long upheld by the Van Der Linden clan and connected in some fashion to their old and vague nobility. All except the bride, groom, and their parents attended in domino garb: loose Venetian cloaks easily worn over any formal outfit, with a mask that covered the upper half of the face. The name had originally referred to the man who wore the outfit, an entertainer of sorts, a harlequin, a circus performer: “Domino” meant “to the lord,” and whether it was a reference to a vassal’s service or to the old “fools for God” sermons, Michael did not know. The game of tiles was named after the sort of shiftless, ambitionless men who had first played it — “to make domino” still meant “to see the end coming,” especially among the Boston Brahmins who so prided themselves on keeping their speech untouched by a world of automobiles and alternating current.
But very quickly the word doubled for the outfit as well as the soul within it, and more and more frequently in these modern times, people used “domino” to refer to the mask rather than the outfit entire: Michael blamed the Lone Ranger and Zorro for this, as both wore the mask but never — or in Zorro’s case, rarely — the cloak. In a proper world, a domino mask should no more be called simply “a domino” than should a cowboy hat be called a cowboy.
Michael accepted many a dance, and kept his eye on a girl in a dark green cloak and purple mask, a girl with a cruel twist of a mouth who danced with any man who asked, even the ones visibly drunk who used the anonymity of the masquerade to sneak gropes and grinds. He didn’t ask to dance with her, but waited for her to come to him.
The night waxed on, and when Samantha seemed to tire, Michael spoke to her in a low, confidential voice. “My young love,” he said, because for all her expertly applied makeup and the beauty of her dress she was still no more than a girl, “are you bothered by my dancing with all these women? I have done so more than enough to satisfy family tradition. We could retire.”
She shook her head as he knew she would, and smiled at him with a weariness which made her seem years older, nearly twenty. “It’s nothing but a barn-dance, sugar. For all the frills, it’s nothing but a round-and-round. You go on, I surely don’t want a grudge held against us by some poor woman who wasn’t able to dance with my groom.”
He kissed her hand and returned to the dance floor as the band struck up “Ain’t We Got Fun,” and the girl in green came to him.
“A dance, oh groom?” she asked, and he recognized Mia’s voice immediately, and the calm anger behind it.
“Of course, dear lady.” He bowed slightly to her and took her hand as they danced with a rhythm all their own, one which acknowledged the music without needing it.
Every morning
Every evening
Don’t we got fun
Twins and cares dear
Come in pairs dear
Don’t we have fun
“Isn’t a groom a man who cares for horses?” she asked quietly, mouth near his ear.
“Be kind, dear lady. It is my bride’s night.”
“Yes, she’s soon to foal, I hear. I wonder how much longer she will want the attentions of her stallion?” Mia’s hand, hidden — at least some — by the two of them dancing and the looseness of her cloak, slid over the front of his trousers.
“Mia –”
“Ah,” she said, and her nail found the back of his neck, tracing across it. “So you knew me for myself.”
“Better than you know yourself,” he murmured back, “but I must insist on some decorum.”
“By all means,” she said, finding him with her fingers, “insist.”
“Sister –”
She stroked him harder, and turned him so he was facing his bride, exchanging pleasantries with the Chicago Van Der Lindens. “Will she bear many children for you, Rabbit?” she asked, as he stiffened at her touch and she rubbed him with palm and fingertips. “Will your daughters replace your sisters? Have I grown too old for you?”
“Darling — you must stop. Someone will see.”
“None can see, Goofo,” she whispered, “none but one, and I think I have only dreamed him.”
Michael couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, though, and started to push her away, but she resisted fervently enough that there was no way to disengage himself from her without drawing attention.
She wouldn’t stop rubbing him, and he was sure every eye followed the movements of her elbow. “Is this how it will be? You at the center, with your puppybitch? Me at the fringe, everyone wondering what to do with me? Is this how it will be, Michael, after I’ve waited for you to come back from the war, wondering if you’d die in Europe without me?” She ground her palm against him, and he gasped in pain.
“You forget yourself, little sister,” he murmured, so quietly he could barely hear himself. Michael Van Der Linden was not a man who ever shouted. Where other men felt that urge, he had silence. “Mind you your place.”
She nipped his earlobe and let a single drop of blood coat her tongue. “Remind me of it,” she whispered against his throat. “Show me to it.”
Moments later he took her in a changing closet by the swimming pool, slapping her across the collarbone where no one but her maid would see the marks, dragging his nails across her pristine thighs and back, and rutting with her like the humping, grunting little dog she was. They rejoined the party not long after, once he’d refreshed himself with a washcloth and cologne, and when he took his new wife to bed he assumed she would be too young and ill-experienced to recognize the smell of another woman on him.
Night or day-time
It’s all play-time
Ain’t we got fun
#
In the downbelow, there were no windows and few mirrors.
The passage from the garden had led at an angle — like a slide, but not as steep, and easy to climb in either direction — to an innocuous trap door in Mia’s bedroom, by the far side of her bed. It was easy enough to crawl into when standing on the bed, and easy to make one’s way through in the dark.
Someone had been with him in the night. Katrine, maybe — he had never fully woken up, but had been sure of a female presence, a female breath against his skin. Maybe she’d never left the house after all. Maybe something had happened to her the way it had happened to him.
And he’d dreamed about –
No.
He’d dreamed as Michael. He wasn’t even sure “dream” was the right word, because he couldn’t quite tell if he’d been asleep at the time — only that the experience fell sometime between when he crawled down the passageway into Mia’s room and when he got out of bed to take a leak, that early morning instinct that kicked in long before he came to himself enough to know how he should be feeling.
He sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette from the pack Katrine had left behind, taking a deep drag off of it and stifling the urge to cough. He’d quit smoking a while ago, and hadn’t smoked religiously in a few years — but he’d always seen it as the sort of thing he’d come back to some day, when he needed it. He took a few puffs and stubbed it out in Katrine’s half-full ashtray, chasing the aftertaste with a gulp of Scotch, and then wandered out into the hallway, where he thought the reception might be better.
There was a moment, just a moment, when he couldn’t remember the number, and the phone he had on him only had west coast numbers in memory. But then it came to him, and while he waited through three rings before she picked up — she never picked up before the third ring — he mentally crossed his fingers that the call would go through and stay through, at least long enough to talk.
“Hello hello,” she said, and he smiled in the near-dark.
“Hi Jen. It’s Castle.”
“Castle!” she shouted, and then giggled. “Oh geez. Sorry. I just — I haven’t talked to you in — in how long? In months! Where are you? How are you? Why haven’t you visited?” It was so strange hearing her, on two levels: one, because her voice was so unlike what it had been before her husband blew the two of them up — child-like, but not like it had actually been when she was a child; two, because she was so solidly and vividly a part of his life before Domino.
“Oh Jen, I’ve just been busy, you know.”
“Uh huh. Are you going to visit soon?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. How have you been? What have you been doing?”
“I play video games now. I don’t think I played them much before, did I?”
“No, not that I recall. Not very much.”
“Well, I do now.” She sounded worried, and her voice turned faint for a minute as though she’d forgotten to keep it close while she talked, something she did sometimes. “I hope that’s okay. I want to stay being like me. I know everyone misses me.”
“Honey, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Like that. Like that. You didn’t used to talk to me like that. Calling me honey. With your voice like silver and elevens. You used to talk to me different, when I wasn’t stupid.”
“You aren’t stupid.” Anger boiled up. “You are not stupid, Jennifer.”
“But I’m how I am. And that’s enough to make me different from how I used to am.”
“Different isn’t worse, sweetheart.”
“Now you’re sweethearting!” she shrieked, but quickly calmed down. “Now you’re sweethearting. That’s what I mean. Remember you used to call me shithead? I’m different and you don’t. And I play video games, but Castle I like them. I like them and is that okay? I don’t want to be different. Not when I don’t have to be. Like I keep my hair the same. When it grew back I made them cut it the way it was before. So I’d be as same as I could be. Castle, you need to come see me, you need to come visit, you need to remind me what I’m like.”
“Well, maybe I’ll be there soon, but what video games are you playing?”
“Grand Theft Auto Vice City From Rockstar Games,” she said, as though it were all the title, “and The Sims: Livin Large Expansion Pack From Maxis.”
“Well see, there you go. Those video games weren’t around before. Maybe you would have played them, see? If you could have.”
“Oh!” she squealed. “Oh Castle I’ll bet you’re right! I’ll bet you are, Castle Finch! See? See why I need you?”
He grinned, and flipped the safety off of the handgun. “I wish I could be there now, Jen, I’d play video games with you.”
“Would you take me to the circus?”
He stopped, and leaned against the wall, closing his eyes. “Jennifer, I don’t go to the circus. You know that.”
“Because that’s where your dad died?”
“Yeah.”
“But aren’t you with him now?”
“… what?”
“Aren’t you dead? Jonathan told me, yesterday, he said Castle’s dead. And that was why you hadn’t called me.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“I think if you’re dead it would probably be all right to go to the circus, and they have elephants.”
“It’s — Jen, I’m not dead. Believe me.” He looked down at the gun. “Believe me, I’m not dead. Okay?”
She didn’t say anything for a long time, and he expected the hissing to come back, or the voices. “Do you hear that?” she asked.
“What?”
“Singing. In the mean time — in between time — ain’t we got fun –”
“Ah, geez. Just ignore it, Jen. I’m going to have to go soon.”
“‘Kay. But first, Castle? Castle? Castle?”
“Yeah — yeah, Jen, what?”
“Castle, we have to talk.”
“Kiddo, we are talking.”
“No, I mean — in my head — where I’m not playing the video games — in the hard place? There are thoughts, things, I need to talk to you.” She sounded agitated, and started to slur.
“Okay, hey, calm down. Remember, if you get too upset, the doctor is going to make you hang up.”
“Okay. Okay. Cabbage time.”
“What?” But it rang a bell.
“The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things. Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax –”
“Of cabbages,” he finished for her, “and kings.” It was still Jen’s voice on the other end, though. Not Michael’s, Mia’s, the house’s, whoever it was he’d been hearing. Still, the sudden Alice reference made him nervous, jittery, and he found himself pacing the hallway.
“I think you haven’t been happy with who you are,” she said, every word enunciated like it came with effort. “I think it’s okay because you aren’t who you are. I think it’s like — what it is — we’re all different to different people. Not just ‘I’m your sister,’ or ‘I’m someone’s friend,’ or ‘I used to be a wife,’ but I mean: I’m smarter with you than with David, before David died. I’m funnier with Teddy –”
“You’re funnier with Teddy than with me?” he asked, surprised.
“Teddy and I laugh all the time. All the time. We’re all jokes.”
“We tell jokes. You and me. We’ve had our laughs.”
“Oh Castle.”
“What?”
“Castle, you’ve always been so sad. So so sad. It’s a different kind of funny when I’m around you. It’s a different kind of Jennifer.”
“Oh.” He sat down on the lowest-level stairs, one hand on the phone, the other fingering the gun absently.
“Maybe you’re not as sad with other people. Maybe you weren’t as sad with Rachael. But you were sad with me even before I was in the accident. Even before then. Even when we were kids. You always thought you were so much older than me, but you’re only six years older. Only six. That isn’t very much.”
“No. No, I guess it’s not.”
“The problem is — do you remember what I was talking about?”
“About — how we’re different people. Remember?”
“I remember,” she said confidently. “I wanted to make sure you did, and hadn’t gotten wrapped up in being sad again. The important thing is don’t think you’re someone else.”
“Someone else what?”
“Someone besides who you are. If you’re clever with Jennifer and happy with Rachael and angry with Jonathan, that’s who you are. That isn’t a mask. Or if it is, then there’s only masks. There isn’t a Castle who’s pretending to be those things. There isn’t a Castle in the sky looking down on the Castle in your life. That’s what I tell myself all the time. Stop trying to be the Jennifer who isn’t the Jennifer I am.”
“That sounds like pretty good advice, Jen,” he said, only half-listening as he noticed something.
“See, there you go, you’re being sad again.”
“Sorry about that. I guess it’s how I am — how I am with you, then.” One of the store room doors down here wasn’t closed all the way. It had been the last time he’d been down here, he was positive, because the last time was when the exorcists were there.
He got up, leaving the gun behind, and opened the door the rest of the way. Some of the boxes at the back of the room had been moved aside — all the boxes were out of order, moved away from the walls like someone had been looking for something. And at the back of the room, starkly polished and standing out against the dust-coverage of the rest of the room, was a door, with a key still in its lock.
“I don’t know if I can keep talking to you when you’re so sad,” Jen said. “It makes my head hurt.”
“Honey, I’m sorry — things are — it’s. I’m sorry. I am. I’m not trying to be sad with you.”
“Well, I’m going to let you go,” she said, and he would have grinned on any other day, because the phrase was so Old Jen, exactly the way she ended every telephone conversation. “I don’t want to be around sadness right now.”
He only needed a brief look at the key to recognize it: it was the key from the circus tent, the key from the music box. “I don’t blame you, I really don’t.”
The door swung open easily, and he found Katrine. And Cardinal Baroni. And Allan Ramsey. And Piero Strabo. And a dozen others he’d never recognize unless there were drivers’ licenses in the pockets of the several who wore tatters over their moldy meat-wrapped bones.
For a moment, just a moment, like that hum as your eyes adjust to darkness or sudden light, he was sure he saw his father, too, head hollowed out into cotton candy; and Rachael, cold and still on warm moist blankets; Ingrid, with her head split open where it’d hit the wall; Grace, wet and dripping and blue. For a moment he saw his mother, and Jennifer, and Romaglio and Reynolds — for a moment he saw too much.
Hanging on the far wall like a mounted animal, like a cathedral crucifix, was the one body he was pretty sure he could identify, and it hit him like a hand on his throat, like footsteps on the roof: he knew the dress from the Van Der Linden wedding photographs, and he knew the handiwork from Pasmore’s murder. It had to be Samantha. It had to be Michael’s child-bride.
“Castle?” Jen asked.
“… Jen. What?” He almost forgot where he’d left his voice. The bodies smelled. Not like rot — or maybe rot was part of it, but that wasn’t how it registered — but like heavy sweat and body odor and thick rich blood and shit and piss. They smelled like everything expelled by life, but there was no doubting they were dead.
There was no doubting he was the last one left in a house in which he was not at all alone, and somehow it was only then that he remembered that Jennifer was dead.
“Castle,” Jen asked, “do you remember when Rachael died? Do you remember that? Is that why you’re sad?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, Jen. Oh Jesus. Oh fuck. I have to go. I have to go. I can’t talk right now. I can’t tell what’s real, I don’t know if this is even you.”
The pause on the other end extended for a long time that he remained convinced was Jen’s time, Jen’s pause, before the house cut in in its sickly little sinister fucking singsong: “‘If I wasn’t real,’ Alice said — half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous — ‘I shouldn’t be able to cry.’”
He staggered backwards out of the hidden room, the air around him stinking like a bleeding locker room, and fell on his ass, face wet and eyes blurry as he dropped the phone.
Music streamed from the walls, from the ceiling, from everywhere, like a good stereo system:
Just to make their trouble nearly double,
Something happened last night.
To their chimney a gray bird came,
Mr. Stork is his name.
In the mean time –
In between time –
Ain’t we got fun?