Downbelow Domino, Chapter Twenty
April 8th, 200820.
“It’s not just the front rooms,” Castle told McCall, feeling panic sidle up to his voice. He’d grabbed a phone on the ground line, in case there was something about the cellular phones that made them more … vulnerable. “It’s every window in the house. Every window is a mirror now.”
“All right,” McCall said. “Stay calm. I don’t see anything like that on the monitors, Castle. Why don’t you go upstairs –”
“I am upstairs.”
McCall paused before answering, and Castle could hear him typing. “I’m looking at you sitting in the living room.” Another pause. “You’re not holding a phone, though … do you have me on speaker?”
“I’m telling you, I’m on the third floor. I came upstairs to check the last of the windows so I wouldn’t look like an idiot if you came by and said, hey, look, it’s a regular window. I’m not in the living room, and I don’t have you on speaker phone. The monitors are wrong.”
“Let me talk to Katrine.”
“She’s not — she’s downstairs. Hang on, she’s in the downbelow, it’s gonna take me a bit.”
“I’m showing her sitting on your lap in the living room. You’re telling me she’s not with you?”
Castle grunted, jogging down the stairs. “Christ’s sake, for the last time, I’m telling you I’m not in the living room. All right? The monitors are fucked.”
“Goddamn. Do you have your remote with you? Hit the green button.” Castle did, and waited, and McCall asked, “Third floor stairs halfway down, on the reflection side?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m still seeing you in the living room.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. A loop, a delay?”
“Maybe. Okay. I’m coming over.”
“You’re coming over?”
“Forty-five minutes, an hour tops. Stay out of the downbelow and keep Katrine with you.”
#
Left for where?
The letters she’d been rifling through were still on the bed, along with the book where he’d first discovered Michael and Mia’s epistolary adventures, which she’d left open. He frowned as he glanced down at it, and then picked it up. The entry it was open to — he remembered it — was the same as the letter she’d left next to the book.
Goofo,
I am very sorry. Please do not be cross.
Only, you must come to me, and tell me what I’m like. You must remind me of myself, Michael, you must bring me myself, please, I beg of you. I ask so little of you, and I know, you have given me Domino, I should be grateful for it, but please oh please, I have given you so much, so much my lord, so much.
your always,
your
Mia.
The handwriting was different: that of the book was the same throughout, albeit sometimes more rushed than others, or more careful. The handwriting in the letter –
He picked up a handful of letters by Mia that he’d read before, and a couple he hadn’t. They were written in the same old-fashioned, loopy script as the Goofo letter — distinctly different, in a dozen or more ways he could see when he held them side-by-side, from the handwriting in the book. The lower-case f’s weren’t remotely similar — he wasn’t sure he’d recognize the letters’ f as what it was, out of context — and the upper-case D’s, and all of the lower-case letters that dipped below the line, like q, g, p, and so on. That was aside from spacing, slant, all those other things he supposed handwriting analysts learned to talk about, where he could only nod at them and say “they aren’t the same.”
Someone had copied the letters into the book. Someone other than Mia. He didn’t know why he trusted that the letter-writer was Mia and the book-writer was not — it could have gone the other way around. He couldn’t quite say that it made more sense for the book to be the copy, because he had no sense to put to it. But it felt more right.
He made a slow circuit of the downbelow, noting without emotion the immaculate cleanliness of Mia’s bedroom after Jonathan’s hired crew vacuumed away the remains of Lamont Pasmore, leaving only the very faint tingle of industrial cleaning agents; and the hair ribbon on the kitchen table that Diana must have lost or left behind as a token. The kitchen still smelled like sex and sweat, and that hyperreality hit him again, the sheer fact that he had fucked a pop star in his kitchen, hard enough for her to sweat.
It wasn’t that she was famous — he’d had sex with about as many famous women as nonfamous ones, although fame was an elastic and twisty thing that was hard to quantify in objective terms, and some of them were only famous because he’d fucked them. But even so: fame itself, in a void, without context, didn’t turn him on. Power had done it for him, and the secret knowledge that a girl famous for her virginity didn’t possess it: that she’d marry some backup dancer in Vegas, and he’d wonder just who had had her first.
His attraction to the idea of fucking her, to the fact that he had fucked her, was more solid than his memory of doing so, which stayed hazy — vivid in smells and the feel of skin, the curve of her ass against his thighs — but slippery almost to the point of hypotheticality when it came to how he’d felt and what he’d been thinking.
Mia’s bedroom reminded him that the voice on the phone had mentioned the other priests, the ones who’d gone back to Rome with Pasmore. Except Pasmore hadn’t gone back. The voice had said they were dead.
He stopped in front of Mia’s room after checking the rest of the downbelow, and dialed Cardinal Romaglio’s cell phone number, waiting through the long strange pause of international cellular calls. “Yes,” Romaglio finally said on the other end, sounding haggard, and Castle realized he wasn’t entirely certain what time it was either in Massachusetts or Rome, but it was probably late.
“Rommy, it’s Castle,” he said. “There have been — some developments. Can you talk?”
“Castle!” Rommy said. “I should say there have been. None of my party returned to Rome.”
Castle’s heart sank. “I knew Pasmore hadn’t.” He explained that quickly, and rushed to bring up the phone call telling him the other three were dead as well.
“I have a message from Jonathan,” Rommy admitted, “he said it was urgent, but he always does, and Rome has been busy for me since I returned. Baroni is the sort of Cardinal whose absence is immediately noted: he keeps as politically active as an exorcist can expect to, and although he will never be Pope nor at the right hand of one, he sees himself as the sort to whom those in power should come for advice. Enough know that he came with me to America that I am besieged by priests and Cardinals wanting to know his whereabouts. And now you tell me he too is dead?”
That ‘he too’ didn’t ring right. “You almost sound like you knew Pasmore was dead.”
“No …” Rommy sounded confused, sounded old. “He had trouble, yes? In the basement? A breakdown.”
“That’s what we remembered, yeah, but Katrine and I couldn’t remember the specifics — or what had happened the rest of the night. Hang on — doorbell. McCall’s here to see what’s what.” He explained, as he headed up the stairs from the downbelow, about the rest of the phone call, and the mirrors where the windows had been. He left Diana out of it, feeling less and less connected to that game, that dalliance.
“Castle,” Romaglio said, “You need to get out of that house. Do you truly believe Jonathan would have you killed if you triggered the alarm?”
“For all I know that’s all it would take for me to die right there, poison capsule or something.” But that was only if the light were red, of course. It had been green. Green for go. Green meant safe, and that the alarms were off.
It was still green when he got to the foyer. “Rommy, sit tight a minute, McCall might want to talk to you. Okay?”
“Yes. But not too long, Castle — it’s late, and I will need to rise early in the morning if I wish to avoid my interrogators.”
Castle opened the door, and McCall walked in, immediately looking frustrated as he peered at the windows.
“See?” Castle said. “Like I said, they’re all mirrors.”
McCall walked by him into the living room, looking at those carefully, and then turned to his side. “Yeah, it looks fine now,” he said, “you’re sure you didn’t just catch your reflection or something?”
Castle frowned. McCall was facing away from him. “It doesn’t fucking look fine, it looks like a mirror. Look at it, I can see myself as clear as –” He stopped. He could see himself just fine. What he couldn’t see was McCall. McCall didn’t show up in any of the mirrors.
Castle waved his hand back and forth behind McCall’s back, watching his reflection wave back at him from the mirror. His reflection looked pale, washed-out, hungover, which he supposed was how he felt. McCall kept up his conversation that Castle wasn’t having, responding to things he wasn’t saying, as though he were on a phone call Castle couldn’t hear the other side of.
Who the fuck was he talking to?
“Castle?”
Castle jumped, and then realized it was Romaglio on the phone. “Jesus, Rommy. Sorry, I spaced for a minute. Uh, listen — McCall’s here, but he’s, um, ignoring me.” When Romaglio didn’t say anything, Castle continued, “I mean, he’s holding a conversation and all, but he’s not responding to things I’m saying, and he’s acting as though I’m saying completely different things.”
“That sounds like a communication problem, but –”
“Okay, let me point out, too, that he doesn’t show up in the mirrors. And that he said they aren’t mirrors, they’re just windows.” Castle stood right in McCall’s path to see if the guy would bump into him, notice him, but McCall veered around him at the last minute without seeming to realize he’d done so.
“Is Katrine still there?” Romaglio sounded more alert now, sharper.
Castle shook his head. “No. Maybe. I don’t — she was here, when I was on the phone with Ricky. I called McCall as soon as the windows went fucked up, and when I went back downstairs, she was gone. I didn’t hear the door or anything, but — I guess she left …”
“Downstairs where? Did you check the garden room?”
Castle started. He hadn’t, in fact. “Hang on. I’m going to check it now.” He left McCall behind him, continuing his conversation with the imaginary, and added, “She was in the downbelow, down in one of the bedrooms there.”
“For heaven’s sake, Castle, why?”
“Uh, we just — were. It’s — we’ve been sort of hanging out down there. We were going through the letters. McCall’s secretary, he won’t even show up here and collate since McCall warned him about Pasmore. Not that I blame him, but –”
“Yes,” Romaglio said, “and given what happened to Lamont, what possesses you to visit that place?”
“Fucking Christ, it’s not like we were in Mia’s room!”
“Watch your mouth, and that’s not the point. I wonder about the –”
“What?”
Romaglio sighed on the other end of the phone, a sigh that came through so crystal clear that Castle could almost swear he felt the air from it. “I wonder about the state of your mind, my boy. The effects of isolation are not to be underestimated. They warn us of them on religious retreats — especially the most social of the clergy, who are more accustomed to the hustle and bustle.”
“Christ’s sake, I’m not some shallow socialite going crazy because I’m cocktail-party-deprived.”
“I know you have a psychiatrist, Castle — when I speak to Jonathan, I’m going to suggest that he come by for a house call.”
Castle threw open the door to the garden room. “Can we stop overlooking the fact that I’m currently wandering around our house without McCall being able to see me, and that the windows have all turned into mirrors? Katrine isn’t in the garden, by the way.”
“You’re there now?”
“I’m there now.” He blinked as he realized that a good deal of the ground had been dug up from below — as though by groundhogs, or beavers, or weasels, or whatever it was that did that kind of thing. Scorpions in the stovetops.
“Whose house, by the way?”
“What?”
“You said ‘our house.’”
“I meant my house.”
“You’re really worrying me.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that. Look. Romaglio. Talking to you right now, I think it’s what’s keeping me from panicking. Okay? I’m in the garden room, and it’s all dug to hell. I mean, like by wolverines, or –”
“Wolverines?”
“Whatever. Squirrels? I don’t know from animals. We had people for that. But there are these holes coming up from the ground, and the garden is halfway fucked to Hanover, is my point.” He paused, listening to the Boston in his voice. The Finches tended to have their own accent, from being raised here there and everywhere — but when you rubbed one hard enough, you found Boston Irish, and once in a very great while Castle got rubbed hahhda nuff. “I’m saying, if I were nuts, would I panic over crazy shit? I don’t think I would. I’d be breathing in the crazy. Fish don’t worry about drowning, right?” Romaglio didn’t say anything, and Castle kicked dirt away from the mess that had been made of the ground. “What I’m looking at, it’s like a tunnel, almost. There’s boards down below this a little ways. It looks like there was a, whatcha call, a passageway up from the downbelow into the garden. I’m guessing Katrine came up that way — God knows why.” The Boston again. Why came out sounding almost like whoy. “She had to push a lot of dirt up and everything, but –” He pushed his foot down into the hole. “Yeah, it’s a concrete tunnel thing, like the top of a submarine or something. Another way out of the downbelow.”
“Castle, what did we do to poor Piero?”
“What?”
“And Philip. I — why was I the one to leave? Why was I the one to go?” Romaglio’s voice broke on every third or fourth word. “My God, Castle, what did we do to them?”
Castle left the garden room and looked to see where McCall had gotten to, finding him in the nursery on the second floor. He was talking to thin air again, but something about his — was it his expression? his tone of voice? no, it was where his eyes were pointed, the fact that his head was tilted down — made Castle think he was talking to Katrine now. Or to the imaginary Katrine. Or to the Katrine Castle couldn’t see. Or — whatever.
“We didn’t do anything, Rommy,” Castle said, and he realized he’d been gradually raising his voice, the way you do when you’re on a cell phone outside and ambient noise breathes out of a thousand invisible mouths: wind in trees, traffic that’s bled into the horizon, animals you’d never curl up next to on an afghan, conversations that’ve diffused into nothing but beebuzz. Maybe being in the garden had made him do it, but realizing it didn’t make him stop. He covered an ear with his hand, his voice at that height where everything came out in the same tone, everything came out half-shouted — Jonathan had drilled into him, again and again, how to project your voice without doing that, but it was an instinct you shook consciously if at all. “It wasn’t us! I don’t know — it was the house — or Mia, or Michael — it wasn’t us!”
“Come, there’s no use in crying!” said the voice on the phone through a gauzy crackle like a pretzel bag, and it wasn’t Romaglio anymore, but it wasn’t Michael either. “‘Come, there’s no use in crying!’ said Alice to herself rather sharply. ‘I advise you to leave off this minute!’ (She generally gave herself very good advice, and sometimes scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes, and once she remembered boxing her own ears for having been unkind to herself in a game of croquet she was playing with herself, for this very curious child — this very curious child — was quite fond of pretending to be two people.) ‘But it’s no use now,’ thought poor Alice, ‘to pretend to be two people. Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!’”
“Who the fuck is this?” Castle asked. “Is this Mia now?”
“I’m Button Bri-ight, I’m Button Bri-ight,” she sang. “I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t really caa-are.”
He started to say something else, and the phone just sizzled at him like frying pork fat, spitting and hissing, and he dropped it, because for just a second he was sure it was going to burn him. He let it stay there, still hissing audibly, and stormed into one of the bedrooms, where he had another cell, and dialed Rommy’s number from that.
Two rings and then, “Castle? Did your phone die?”
“Yeah, not exactly. Phantom phone call intruded.” He grabbed a third cell from the drawer and headed downstairs after McCall’s footsteps. “Listen, please, call Jonathan? Tell him what you remember. Tell him I didn’t kill Pasmore. He’s never going to consider letting me out of here otherwise, unless it’s to be sent to some ’sanitarium’ where I’ll be zonked out on whatever’s fashionable for the next thirty years.”
There was a long enough pause that Castle thought the house had cut him off again.
“Romaglio?”
“I’m sorry, Castle, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“What are you talking about? You’re the one’s been saying you thought you could put a good word in for me –”
“Castle — my boy — I’ll certainly speak to Jonathan, but I won’t lie to him. I saw you kill Lamont. You know I did. It’s been all I can think about. I still see his face, every time I close my eyes — every time I –”
Castle hung up the phone just as McCall left the house, and the light over the door still blazed emerald.
#
She nodded along to something someone Castle couldn’t see had said — the invisible other Castle, maybe, or the other Katrine. He hated thinking of them that way, but there was no getting around the fact that people who couldn’t see him were interacting with people he in turn couldn’t see. He sighed, and while listening to McCall’s methodic interrogation of both her and Charlie Hollis, the gatehouse guard from 1955 to 1975 when Michael died, he tried calling various people on his three cell phones and the ground line.
Once in awhile he got through, but usually only briefly, and more and more frequently people seemed to be responding to things he wasn’t saying. It felt paranoid to think of it that way: like he was falling prey to some dissociative disorder, unable to properly gauge the correct response to things. He even tried talking to Doc Williams about it, but Williams only promised to messenger over a fresh bottle of sleeping pills, which didn’t seem a reasonable solution any way you sliced it.
Most of the calls failed without incident. Some of them yielded singing, or buzzing that sounded like a cross between tuneless humming and a hornet’s nest.
He was less and less sure that his reflection was a reflection.
He thought very carefully — the way you do when you’re drunk, or it’s the middle of the night and you’re suddenly awake and need to remember why — about the green light, and why it was that he wasn’t leaving the house. He had weighed the options. On the one hand, he knew what was in the house. He knew every room, every piece of furniture, knew it in the dark, knew it by smell. He hadn’t followed the hole in the garden, but he had shined a Maglite down far enough to see that it led into Mia’s bedroom, and he could connect that to his mental map of the house and its downbelow.
Outside, he didn’t know anymore. The house was like a skin he’d had grafted to him, and he wasn’t sure it was safe to break it.
But more than that: he wasn’t sure the light was real. He knew there had been a light there, indicating the alarm status for the system which didn’t prevent people from coming in — there was a separate system for that which he rarely bothered with — but prevented him from leaving. He didn’t know what it did — whether it notified Jonathan or his people, or activated something they may have put in him when he underwent surgery. But he knew that when the alarm turned on, the light was red.
Before the system was activated, the light wasn’t on at all. At no point had he seen it turn green, until the strangeness of today.
So maybe the house was tricking him. Maybe it wanted him to try to leave through that door. Maybe it knew what would happen — or wanted to find out.
Every time he saw the green light, he thought greenlightgo, and had to stop himself again, working through this, coming once more to the realization that there was no reason to think the green light made him safe, unless he could talk to someone on the outside who told him so.
He went through this several times as he listened to Andrea and Charlie talk about the Van Der Lindens and how nervous Samantha had been after Michael’s birth, and how she’d fretted over him but barely spoke to her daughter Clarissa, who was twenty-one by then and about to graduate from Radcliffe. Charlie remembered Michael as a quiet, bookish boy — not the sort who was easily bullied, but the intense, determined kind, one who — Charlie said — had the women lined up by the time he was a teenager. Andrea made a show of scoffing at the idea of the boy she’d nursed becoming anything other than the light of the world, and then something cut her ears off.
Red lines slashed down the sides of her neck as her ears fell to the ground, and Charlie jumped up, shaking and smelling like he’d pissed his pants, and then his throat filled up with a gurgle, and he sank to his knees, clutching it, turning purple.
“Castle!” McCall shouted, facing a place he wasn’t. “Castle, fight it! Fight the house!”
McCall held up his arms in front of his face and screamed when something fell across them hard enough to shear a strip off, a striation of skin and muscle briefly and vividly clear above the white flash of bone before blood clouded it over.
Everyone but Castle was screaming, and after a moment he wasn’t sure if he was or not. They were being attacked from two sides, as Andrea’s clothes were torn off and McCall’s face fell open in mid-shout, jaw broken with a snap like a drumstick twist, upper lip peeled away like the foil liner of a coffee can, leaving a meaty stub for his nose amidst planes of red, and a long flap of skin dangling ridiculously from his forehead.
Castle stood perfectly still for a moment, breathing hard and raspily, his peripheral vision sending him a thousand fight-or-flight signals as movement filled the reflections in the mirrored windows — a dozen Castles cast on silver and light were grabbing the air, tearing at it, snarling, in all the places where McCall and the servants would have been if their reflections showed up.
The screaming grew wet as Castle grabbed first McCall and then Charlie, trying unsuccessfully to pull them away from their attackers, and Andrea writhed on the ground as hard, cruel bruises like handprints appeared on her varicosed legs. Charlie coughed once, a hard, dry cough that sounded as though he’d been trying to get it out the whole time, and then something ground his face into the hardwood floor until his jaw snapped with a force hard enough to scatter his teeth clattering across the floor. They sounded like pearls poured onto a marble countertop.
It became unspeakable.