Downbelow Domino, Chapter Twenty-Two and final
April 9th, 200822.
Barely visible through the tatters of Samantha’s wedding dress, as a cluster of small bones, was the dead unborn child who must have been Michael’s third — no, Castle realized suddenly. His second.
“Isn’t that right?” he asked, sitting there on the floor and staring across the room. He had to shout to hear himself over the music. “That’s it, isn’t it? You killed Samantha — one of you did. Was it you, Michael? She found out about the downbelow, didn’t she? She found out about you and Mia — that you’d been fucking your little baby sister for most of her life, the sister you’d told your wife to look like. Is that why you killed her?”
The music rose like it was trying to drown him out, and Castle stood up, flipping open the phone. Nothing. No signal. The display just kept scrolling by, IN THE MEAN TIME — IN BETWEEN TIME –
“It’s Samantha’s handwriting in the journal, right? She copied over the letters? You must have left them laying around somewhere. Was she going to go to a lawyer with them? Or did you just hate it that she knew? That she’d taken your little secret?”
As it had when he took the breakup letter into Mia’s room, the air doubled up, cold and damp, and shoved him. He landed sprawled on the stairs to the middle level, sliding down two of them before he got his bearings and put his feet down. His spine rang with that funny-bone tingle, and he thought there might be a cut at the back of his head.
“Or was it you, Mia? Did Samantha confront you? Did she tell you she was pregnant again? Was she stupid enough to think that gave her an extra claim, that you’d — what — see reason? Slink off to parts unknown? It only made you angrier, didn’t it. Angrier at Michael, who kept telling you he was going to stop sleeping with his wife, right? But you couldn’t take it out on him. So you had to kill her. Is that what happened?” Even thinking about it he felt rage he couldn’t claim to own, a frightening bubble of violence that churned his stomach and pumped his heart, until he didn’t know whether he wanted to throw up or jack off.
Even thrown aside from it, he could see the hidden room clearly, and his memory filled in the nooks and crannies his eyes couldn’t reach.
It was large, with a floor that sloped downwards in all directions, towards the center, where a black iron grate lay, stained with God knows what from God knows when. The ceiling was maybe half again as high as those in most of the rest of the house, and the walls and floor were all exposed stone, stained brown and red in amorphous splotches. There were a number of metal doodads here and there drilled into the wall — the sort of fixtures you’d use to steady machines of some sort.
A distillery? Had Copland made moonshine down here? Or at least stored it? The grate on the floor was wide enough to deal with the occasional burst container that was a common risk in bootlegging. But it had served another purpose later, when the Van Der Lindens came to Domino.
Several of the bodies were hung from the ceiling or on the wall, with hooks and chains that were connected to a series of metal bars that ran the length of the ceiling — for a moment, it reminded Castle of those ladders on runners in some bookstores, the ones that slid along like a trolley but were secured to keep them from toppling. A bed — little more than a cot — and a workbench had been moved in here ages ago, and the sheets had long since been stripped off of the moth-bitten mattress, which might have been white once but had long since been yellowed and leopard-spotted with shit-brown and blood-rust memories.
Samantha’s was not the only corpse: but hers was the only clothed one. She hung on the ceiling exactly opposite from the door, as though watching everything, like a prized trophy or an idol.
The priests were hung up on the hooks, stuck through the soft parts of their throats like fish, their bodies gone dark and waxy in places. Strabo’s was still wet, still dripping ever so slowly, a treacle trickle like a faucet that never shut all the way, a trickle the drain collected. Most of his skin between his neck and waist seemed to have been removed; some of it listed in ragged edges, and a patch remained at his left nipple, making it look starkly, strangely highlighted. Some of the blood was clotted — did that happen after death? Or had he been alive long enough for it to happen?
Katrine was the most recently killed, and Castle would almost bet she was still warm. She was bent over the bed, knees on the floor on the far side from him, head face-down on the mattress in the midst of a brighter, fresher, glossier pool of red. She was naked, her clothes nowhere in sight, and what Castle could see of her back and arms was covered in abrasions, some of them dark red with blood blisters.
#
She had found a small packet of letters a maid had displaced, and yes, she had given into curiosity and read them even once she determined that they were addressed to Michael and written in feminine hand. When she realized Mia had written them she was relieved — until it became clear that they had been written after she’d died in the house fire, the one that had so bereaved Michael he scarcely came to his marriage bed for over a month.
A month in which this Mia, this sister of his, had been living in a vast basement Samantha hadn’t even known about. The very existence of this downbelow bothered her, disturbed her, as much as the rest: an entire house had been beneath her, and no one had told her. Not the servants — surely they didn’t know? Not even Marcus, the gatehouse guard? No wonder Michael had been so ever insistent on keeping that position staffed, even when their parties became more and more rare.
Had Michael built it? Or had he bought a house equipped with such, for just this purpose? The extra basement did not appear on the house plans — she had checked, surreptitiously.
Had he bought the house to hide his sister in? Had he planned that from the start? He told her he had liked it because of the name, because their wedding reception had been that silly overblown domino ball.
When Samantha confronted Michael with the letters, he had not seemed upset. He had dismissed her concerns. He had called her — patiently, as though disappointed with her — childish and perverse. The letters she’d copied into her journal, he said, were indeed from his sister — many years ago. The content she mistook for sexual was perfectly innocent, and her reading only demonstrated how far she had come from her naive beginnings. Mia had had a strange sense of humor, and their relationship had had many shared jokes, Michael said. Please do not trouble me further by pricking at old and painful memories.
He had not mentioned the downbelow, nor did she ask about it, despite its mention — and Domino’s — in the letters. When she asked about her resemblance to his sister — she had found a photograph of Mia shortly before the woman’s supposed death, and had pasted it into the journal because it was one that particularly highlighted the similarities between them. “I looked like this once,” she’d written above the photograph, “Would you love me if I did not?” It had struck her that that, finally, was why Michael could not love her: she was only a placeholder for Mia. If she looked different, perhaps Michael would have become acquainted with her on her own merits.
Or maybe, as a woman now in her thirties with a daughter just out of her teens, she was simply too old for Michael Van Der Linden.
When he’d left on a business trip shortly after their confrontation, she found herself wondering if he had women elsewhere. If he still seduced girls, perhaps the daughters of business partners, or those poor women who whored themselves in the big cities. She wondered if he owned other houses, with other families. Or if he were content with two.
She dismissed the servants for the week, telling them that with Mr Van Der Linden gone there was simply little call for them, and that they were welcome to enjoy their time as they liked, perhaps with their families. And she spent two days searching for the downbelow before she found it: a hidden door in the gatehouse. It was one of the last places she would have thought to look — it was so far from the rest of the house, whereas she had imagined something central and clever, a shifting fireplace or revolving bookcase, that sort of thing. One too many matinees, Samantha, she scolded herself. How she hated being stupid. She had always prayed that life with Michael would make her smarter, but she always felt three steps behind him, and two behind the rest of the world.
She had not wandered far into the downbelow before realizing there was more than one level to it. It was an entire house below her home! Furnished much the same, and certainly no less lavishly. She looked closely at as little as possible. She was not ready to start thinking of questions such as whether Michael had paid more attention to the furnishing of his downbelow than his Domino: whether he had put all his best things down here in the dark.
I hear such noises at night, Mia had written in one of her letters, and when Samantha copied it, she thought how perfectly it suited her as well. How am I ever to sleep with such noises? They wake me up suddenly — I hear them every time I turn around, it seems — as though I’m followed — as though they come down through the walls — and the visions they give me, the images in my head, you know I cannot stand them, you know what I have done to myself before in trying to rid myself of them, how can you permit me to suffer such things, O Michael my darling? How can we continue to live in this house? Do you not know what it does to me? Do you not see? Why has it been so long since you have come to my bed and comforted me?
Samantha sighed, and even as she stared resolutely ahead, walking towards the stairs, she felt things crumbling in those places she could not keep ignoring. Mia and Michael’s relationship was surely a sexual one. The best she could hope for was that it was unconsummated — that Mia entertained an improper, degenerate lust for her brother, who took pity on the girl’s clear insanity. It was difficult to hope that was the case; difficult to pin wishes on such an unpleasant thing.
She didn’t reach the stairs the way she intended.
From the darkness at her side, outside the river laid down by the incandescence overhead, came her voice, Mia’s voice. Samantha recognized it from those rare times the woman had spoken to her, but the tone was so different, so very different, worlds away even from the acerbic retorts she’d delivered on occasion after a drink too many.
“Greedy. Fucking. Whore.”
Samantha whirled around so fast and startled she almost lost her balance, and for a moment she hated herself as much as Mia must: she saw herself as she must be seen, as weak and timid, frail like tissue paper, all the things she had never wanted to be and had been afraid she’d become.
Looking at Mia was like looking in a funhouse mirror.
She stood in the doorway of what looked like a child’s bedroom, wearing a simple blue summer dress and pristine white ribbons in her hair. Her makeup, even in the dim light, was clearly over-applied, and with her hands on the sides of the doorway as if bracing her, her head canted to one side, she looked much like a rag-doll. They had the same eyes, she and Mia: the same slope of nose, the same forehead, even the same figure.
Have I always looked so much like her?Samantha wondered. Or have we grown towards each other without being aware of it?
“Mia,” she said out loud, and trained her voice to stay calm, to stay steady. Confident was more than she could manage, and she could hope for the lashings of menace that Mia had filled her own throat with. “So.”
“So,” Mia said. “Did he tell you?”
Samantha shook her head. “He denied it. I found letters.”
“Denied it!” Mia tilted her head to the other side, and grinned. “Denied it. Deeeeenied it. De nydit. I see. Are you going to stop fucking my brother now?”
“Are you going to stop fu– are you going to — to stop fucking my husband?” Blast it, Samantha. Be strong.
“He’s mine. He’s always been mine. He’ll always be mine.” She cocked her head forward, as though sniffing for something, as though listening for something, alert and twitching. “Catching pregnant didn’t help you with that last time, little white trash Southern cunt. It won’t help you this time.”
Samantha’s eyes widened, and she murmured, “How did you know?”
“I can smell it on you, you bleeding filthy whore. I can smell the sickness in your breath, the rot between your legs. You think you’ll give him another child? Another dirty bastard like your fucking little slit Patricia?”
“You leave her alone!” Samantha shouted, suddenly finding her voice. “You leave Patricia out of this!”
“Oh, I will,” Mia said. “She’s nothing to do with this, is she?” She cocked her head again and hissed, like a wild cat. “What is that? What’s that — that looking? What’s that seeing?”
The confrontation wasn’t going the way Samantha had hoped. Mostly she had hoped to discover that Michael was right — that somehow, he hadn’t lied, or had lied about only the least important things. Maybe she had wanted Mia to see her, to apologize, or explain, or — she didn’t know. She just didn’t know. What could possibly have come from this? What could possibly happen now? She would divorce Michael, she supposed, and it would be in all the newspapers. Or she would simply return to her parents’ home, and live apart from him.
“What is that?” Mia asked again, sounding frantic now, almost panicked, looking around wildly. “What did you bring with you? Won’t Bluebeard’s wife ever learn?”
“What are you –”
Mia leapt on her, like a pouncing cat, not clawing her or shrieking but simply pushing her to the ground, grabbing her head with both hands, and slamming it into the floor. “Filthy cunt!” she screamed. “Filthy fucking thieving cunt!” She straddled Samantha and pushed her head down again, slapping her across the face, tearing at her dress and hair. “Dirty dirty cunt!”
Samantha struggled beneath the woman, who was surprisingly strong — but still weaker than Michael, with whom Samantha had had to struggle on more than one occasion, albeit with other goals. She brought a leg up to leverage her and rolled over, pushing Mia away but making the mistake of not continuing to grapple, not pinning the other woman down.
Mia took advantage of the error instantly, swinging her bare foot hard into Samantha’s stomach, and then scampered away, into one of the other rooms off the hallway.
Samantha groaned, clutching herself, wondering if the woman had hurt the baby any — and as she got to her feet, Mia screeched, running at her again with a large black iron in hand –
#
He’d made his way up the stairs to the top floor of the downbelow, where the large winding staircase was, the one that had so frightened him the first time he came down here, when the flashlight had rolled back towards him.
But the staircase wasn’t here anymore. It looked like an ordinary top floor, albeit one without windows. Where the staircase had been, there was now only wall. He ignored that, not trusting his eyes anymore, and continued, “So what? So fucking what? You killed someone. Who hasn’t? Why haven’t you killed me?”
The question was out before he knew he was going to ask it — before he knew it was there to be asked — but immediately it resonated with him. The house had killed Katrine, the priests, McCall, the servants — everyone except him and Romaglio, and Romaglio was in motherfucking Rome and maybe a little batshit.
“I’m right fucking here, you fuckass loonies! Right here, Castle Howdy Motherfucker Finch! What’re you keeping me alive for? What the fuck do you need from me?”
The doors all blew closed simultaneously, and the bedroom mirrors shattered.
#
She rolled Samantha over on the bed, looking down at those weepy, weak, rabbit-wide eyes, those fucking piss-breath eyes, those willowy eyes with their big scared whites and their dark little pupils. The little pussy was all the things Michael had always told her not to be. All the things Michael couldn’t stand. Oh, he’d be so happy. So happy that Mia had cleaned out this wound for him.
The girl-bride-bitch-whore groaned a deep, wet groan like the tidal breath of screams as Mia leaned against her, shoving her hand into the bitch’s cunt so the knife could reach. The groan died out so gradually it was beautiful: like a radio with the volume knob slowly, slowly, slowly turned lower, lower, lower.
Was she going to kill Samantha? She couldn’t remember if she had meant to. She wanted the baby out, wanted the baby dead, and slashed and hacked and ripped at the bridegirl’s thighs. But the bridegirl bitchqueen slutcunt seemed to be dead, tongue thick in her mouth, and if the mother was dead the child would never be born. When she was young and in Sunday school she asked once why the Pharaoh and Herod had singled out the children instead of the mothers. The teacher had threatened to spank her, but told Father instead — and he sent her to her room immediately after meals every day for a week, which meant she didn’t get to see Michael.
Just like Samantha had kept her from Michael.
Well, no more. She’d surprise him. She wouldn’t have to stay in the downbelow any more. She wouldn’t have to stay in the dark. Mia Van Der Linden might be dead, but the world already had open arms for Samantha Van Der Linden. Maybe she wouldn’t even tell Michael. They looked so much alike — with the right makeup — style her hair differently — was it too long? it might be too long — and the right clothes, a few days to gain a couple pounds and hope it went to the hips — she could easily pass for Samantha. Easily. No one would ever know. No one needed to know. How might Michael treat her differently, thinking she was his ladywife devilbitch?
The old passageway the bootleggers had used was still there. Michael had closed it up, but she’d opened it again. She could dispose of Samantha’s body in the lake. Cut it up into little pieces no one would ever identify. She could keep the face and fingerprints, and even if the body was found no one would ever guess it was Mrs Fuckass Bitch Samantha Slut Cunt Van Der Linden.
She looked up suddenly — had she heard footsteps? Had Michael come home already? Did he know to look for her in the changing room — as she called the room they’d converted from the old bootlegger’s cubby hole — or had Samantha left him a note?
“Who’s there?” she called. “Michael? Darling, is that you? Goofo?”
#
He was starting to feel idiotic. Oh, not for talking to the house, exactly, but for running around and shouting. Just because the house was haunted, or what the fuck ever it was, didn’t mean it understood him, or even heard him. You could shout at a bear who was kicking around your campsite, but that didn’t mean the bear would listen to reason.
But he was shouting to distract it, if there was an it to distract. All he was learning from — from whatever was going on — was that Mia and Michael were just as fucked up as they could be, making the Finches look like the Osmonds. Or the Osbornes, at least.
That, and that there was a passageway from the downbelow to the lake or somewhere near it. Of course: the lake was fed by the river, and the river had been used for trading back in the day. You could make it out to Boston Harbor by boat — maybe not anymore, with all the building that’d gone on and everything, but you sure as hell could have at one point. Perfect for a bootlegger with New York connections. Like taking the back road.
Did that mean he had a way out?
He didn’t know how the alarm worked — if it was a perimeter breach sort of thing, or a leash thing: whether it would go off when he got a certain distance away, or when he passed an invisible line. If it was the latter, the passageway might work — and it seemed reasonable to assume it was, because just being in the downbelow at the lowest level would be further from the alarm system than any other point in the house, and then some.
Maybe more importantly, it was the only way out of the downbelow now except for through Mia’s bedroom, and he had a feeling he didn’t want to go in there.
“What is it you want from me? You want to play with me?” He grabbed the gun off the floor on his way back to the abattoir Mia called the changing room, and bit down an urge to gag. “You want to toss me around some more? What’re you waiting for, huh?”
The moment he passed it, the cell phone rang, a sharp, metallic ring — the kind phones used to have when ringers were bells and not electronics or downloaded polyphonic ringtones. He picked it up and flipped it open, and the voice on the other end came instantly, undeniably female despite the harsh hornet-like buzz of static.
“I want your cock.”
#
Michael’s fingers hurt after he backhanded her, a pain that tingled in all the wrong places, and he filed away a worry that he might have suffered a light sprain. Now was not the time to consider that: now was not the time to show the face of concern. For now, Mia needed to understand that she had overstepped her bounds for the very last time.
He’d waited three nights after he came home to find her prancing around Domino in Samantha’s things, not just her clothes but her style, her hair, her scent, her essence. The servants didn’t seem to notice, or were simply close-mouthed Yankees who would never acknowledge what they saw. But Michael knew right away. He knew because Samantha had never shown such strength, exuded such passion, and she had never once — no matter his attempts at training her — behaved as Mia did in bed.
The sex was interesting, from a scientific point of view. It was not like sex with Mia normally was. It was nothing like sex with Samantha had ever been. It was, he supposed, a syncretic blend of Mia attempting to imagine what Samantha was like as a lover — while Samantha’s own bedroom behavior was, in essence, her ability to follow the instructions Michael had given her, based on Mia’s proclivities and skills.
Even if he had not recognized his sister in his wife’s clothes like a wolf in sheep’s, he would have recognized the feel of her cunt, the taste of her throat, the curve of her tits. No perfume could hide the difference in smells. No amount of insight into the character of an admittedly simple woman could conjure up the proper responses to touch and tongue.
He fucked her until he spent himself, and then he hit her twice, once with a full fist in the stomach, and the second time with the back of his hand across her jaw. Despite the pain, he was satisfied with the sound her mouth had made when he connected, and with the burst of shock on her face, that calm in the sky before the storm of her weeping.
“Stupid bitch,” he said quietly, getting up and putting his robe on. “Did you think you had me fooled? Did you think I did not know you?”
“Michael — darling husband –”
He shot her a glance he had conditioned her to when she was still too young to be fucked. “Do not attempt to toy with me further, Mia. What had you intended to do when I eventually came to the downbelow to visit you? Had you meant to head me off there, to play both roles, like some — like some goddamn movie?”
“I remember a movie,” she said quietly, so quietly he could barely hear her. “I remember The Scarecrow of Oz. I remember a movie about a cruel king who would not let his daughter marry as she wished.”
He’d forgotten for a moment: she hadn’t seen a movie in over a decade. She had loved them so much as a girl, and the tinge of sadness he felt was, he decided, the result of missing the girl she had been — the giving, generous girl, not this thieving bitch she had become. “Where is Samantha, Mia?” he asked. “Where has she gone?”
Mia sobbed, and shook her head, and that was all the answer he needed. The girl was dead, then. Well, he would trust to Mia’s ability to clean up after herself: she had had plenty of experience in that, and knew the critical importance of being tidy.
“Do you know,” he asked quietly, rage seething in him as he walked to the bathroom, where he had already drawn a bath for his usual post-coital soak, “just how much work you have created for me? Do you know how business will suffer? The servants, you may have fooled, however briefly: but great Scott, Mia, Patricia will be home from Radcliffe at the holidays — and that is assuming that she does not surprise us with one of her ‘delightful’ impromptu weekend visits. Do you consider yourself prepared to fool my daughter into believing you’re her mother? Do you speak the secret language of mother and daughter, that takes a lifetime to build, a tower of idioms the full signification of which is only determined in retrospect, in mourning? You silly, impulsive twat.”
“This isn’t what I want,” Mia murmured on the bed, as if to herself. “This isn’t how I want it to happen. This isn’t how I want it to happen. This isn’t how I want it to happen.”
“No,” Michael said as he picked up the ivory-handled straight razor from the marble countertop. “I shouldn’t imagine it is. But you need to be punished, dear.”
#
#
“I’m tired of being Samantha, Michael,” she told him, and she remembered telling him that, the first time this happened, when it happened and she was alone, alone with Michael and the razor, she remembered telling him this. But this time she wasn’t alone. “I’m tired of being someone else. Why don’t I be you now? Why don’t you be me?”
“Games later, little girl,” he said mildly, and she didn’t think he was actually paying attention to her. “Work first, play later.”
She opened her eyes to watch his reflection recede in the mirror on the bathroom door, as he came closer, and shook her head. “I can’t be angry at you, Michael. I can’t ever be angry at you, you know that.”
He smiled, and lowered the razor for a moment. “Yes, sweetheart, I know. You know I’m only doing this for your own good. You can’t be angry at me for that.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I brought someone else to be angry for me.”
#
The doorway to the changing room wasn’t a doorway anymore: it was a mirror, a looking glass, and Castle’s reflection wasn’t in it. The phone was gone, or he’d forgotten what it felt like to hold it — some nonverbal communication had passed between him and Mia, and that rage had filled him again, that urge, that vomiting hard-on. He didn’t remember stepping through the mirror, but he knew he was on its other side when the light went different, and Mia stood in front of him with a straight razor, trembling, splotches of sweat beaded up on her forehead.
“What –” he asked, and she shook her head.
“I’m Michael Van Der Linden,” she said, and God was she gorgeous. That cruel, clever mouth, those dark eyes. He’d never been with a woman who looked remotely like her. He wasn’t sure she’d ever met a woman who looked remotely like her. “Do you understand?” she asked, panic in her voice like she was aware that he was constantly on the verge of slipping away. “I’m Michael Van Der Linden, and don’t call me anything else. Don’t call me anything else. I’m Michael, and you need to do what needs doing.”
“Work first,” he said. “Play later.”
“Show neck,” she said, “and show teeth. Hurry — I think I want to hurt you, and I might kill you.”
He knocked the razor from her hand when she raised it, and grabbed her hair, dragging her down to the ground. “No,” he said, “No, Michael, you won’t.”
“You have to be Mia,” she whispered, writhing against him as he pushed her into the bathroom after kicking the razor far away. “You have to be Mia, Mia Van Der Linden, Mia’s dead so long and nobody’s left to be her because she’s so busy down the rabbit-hole, so busy being Samantha, and God –”
“– it’s no use now,” he finished for her, “to pretend to be two people. Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person.”
“Yes,” she said, and he pushed her down on the floor, bending her over and lifting her robe, “God, yes. Don’t forget –” She looked timid for a moment, just a moment, as she raised a hand to her ass.
“I know,” he said, and rubbed his cock between her cheeks as he grabbed a handful of her hair, his knuckles close to her scalp. “You’re Michael Van Der Linden. You don’t have a cunt. And I’m Mia — I’m Mia Van Der Linden, and it’s about goddamn time I fucked you, Michael, isn’t it?”
She groaned as he pushed his cock into her ass, and the groan became a gurgle when he shoved her head down into the tub water.
For minutes, there was no sound except skin slapping against skin, intermittent wet gasps, and a duet of groans, neither of which sounded anything like his own voice. I’m Mia Van Der Linden, he kept thinking, and the thought of it did make him hard, made him feel — not more powerful, exactly, but powerful in a new way, like finding a whole new flavor of ice cream, a basic, primal one: not avocado or rum ripple, but chocolate, strawberry. I’m Mia Van Der Linden, and Michael is my bitch.
When he came, he felt a sudden dissonance, a sudden disconcertedness — as though he’d come in two people at once, and had come as two people at once. He felt both the wonder of feeling an orgasming cock from the first-person perspective, and the momentary revulsion of wondering whose ass he’d just pulled his dick from. And then he stumbled backwards, the surface of the mirror cool and smooth against his skin.
#
Mia gasped, laying back on the bed with a hand on her breast, holding rags there to stop the bleeding. She felt quivery and full of bees, like she couldn’t sit still, like she wanted to laugh and hoot. Michael had cut her — oh, God, how he had cut her — but the fact that he hadn’t killed her meant everything would be all right. Everything would be just fine.
And for a moment — for a moment there — she had imagined things entirely differently, imagined Michael’s head shoved down into his precious bath, and a nice big cock between her legs to shove into him — oh, for a moment it had all been so wonderful, so very wonderful.
Had she dreamed it, she wondered — or had it dreamed her?
#
Castle reached out a hand to steady himself as he stumbled through the changing room, and it landed on one of the dead priests, whose skin felt too soft, too cool, too human. He leaned forward, breathing heavily and deeply to stifle the urge to throw up. The door was obvious — he didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it right away. The bed had been pushed in front of it, and he concentrated on not thinking as he moved Katrine — gently at first, and more urgently when he caught a glimpse of her face — and then kicked the bed over.
The door was the simplest sort, with no knob, just one of those rings you pull. Beyond, a wide tunnel like the ones in ballparks, with railings and a gentle slope, perfect for rolling a cart of whiskey up.
He glanced behind him, and his reflection held a straight razor, doing things to himself with it that Castle knew intellectually could be survived, but that he hoped he’d never test. Domino didn’t want him to leave. Whether it was haunted by the Van Der Lindens — or only one of them — or their victims — or had just absorbed the stains and stink of so much badness, he didn’t know. But it didn’t want him to leave, even if it had shown him the door.
It was night out. At the end of the tunnel, he could see the smallest, shimmering sliver of moonlight against the lake. Would the alarm go off? Would Domino stop him before he reached the end of the tunnel? Would he even know if he’d left, or would all his Samanthas be traded for Mias?
He started walking down the slope, pulling himself forward by the railings as though hiking a steep mountain, and he could smell the lake, that rich smell of algae and sand and the bright slithery green seaweed with the little pods you could pop between your fingers. He could hear it lapping against the shore, and the splish-splash of waterbugs, the far-off moot of loons.
Most of the big shore places would be closed at this hour, and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat arcade for summerfolk. As the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually he became aware of the horizon, the fresh crest of the new world, with its vanished trees, blue lawns, and dark fields. He stepped out of the darkness and into the shadows, and his phone rang again, a simple electronic jingle from a Gap commercial: the digital display said CALLER UNKNOWN, and the signal light was green.
He flipped it open as he bent down to feel the water against his fingertips and the outdoors against his skin, admiring his reflection in the shimmering black and giggling a little to himself. The voice on the phone was old and familiar, like a voice you’ve imagined from favorite books. The house loomed behind him, half of it hidden in the earth, the other half blocking the sky.
“Welcome to the circus, Sebastian.”
###