The Walls of the Castle

by Tom Piccirilli

  Both guards were on the floor, groaning and crawling, shouting, “Help us! Somebody! Help us!”

  Kasteel threw the billy club down and followed them both inch by inch, saying, “Nobody can hear you. Nobody heard me when you kicked the shit out of me last time. No one except the Castle.”

  “You crazy bastard!”

  “Listen, when some homeless folks nab a little food here and there, just let them have it, all right?”

  “Fuck...you...!”

  “Be nice now.”

  “Fuck...”

  What’s it going hurt? Just turn a blind eye, leave them alone. In fact, reach out, help them some.”

  “...you!”

  “A little cash, a couple of sandwiches. I think that’s what you two should do.”

  They crawled. They got to their knees and Kasteel beat them back down onto their bellies. They crawled. Not much blood, but a few drops here and there, a little slug trail of their sweaty fear following them along. Conrad tried screaming like a girl and Kasteel smacked him in the back of the head. Watkins tried the same thing, the scream full of dread and fear. Kasteel wondered where such terror came from. Two huge, strong men, well-paid, well-honored out in the world, driven to their knees with a couple of punches, the kind of thing they were probably used to from bar fights, fucking around with the boys, playing football. But in the Castle you could either find yourself or lose yourself. These two, they didn’t even seem to know their names anymore. He leaned up against a wall and watched them crawl down the hall, ten, twenty, fifty feet, afraid to stand and hold firm. Afraid to stand and run.

  His phone made a noise. He answered and heard three beeps.

  1-1-1

  Kasteel ran.

  The Castle showed deference and respect, perhaps even love, allowing him clear passage. Locked fire doors were already open, corridors seemed to grow shorter. He hurtled through the halls heading for Chester’s room, wondering what had gone wrong now, if the old mute man had been threatened by Abaddon the destroying angel as well. Had Chester’s chart been eaten last night?

  He sprinted past orderlies, kids in wheelchairs, old folks hobbling along, some of Hedge’s friends from the wards wearing trash can lids across their chests, brass pots on their heads, waving PVC piping wrapped in foam and duct tape. Few looked up. Those who did didn’t appear to see him. It felt to Kasteel like he was moving between worlds, dimensions, teleporting a few feet at a time, through walls, vibrating through the Castle, the Castle vibrating through him.

  Kasteel slipped into Chester’s unit and found the old man sitting up in bed.

  “Chester, are you all right?”

  HE WAS HERE.

  “Abaddon?”

  WHO KNOWS WHAT HIS NAME IS, BUT HE WAS HERE. I WAS NAPPING AND AWOKE IN SHADOW. TO A WHISPER HISSING IN MY EAR. IT SAID IT WOULD EAT ME JUST AS IT WOULD EAT ALL ITS ENEMIES. IT SAID IT WOULD RELEASE ME. IT SAID I SHOULD THANK IT.

  “Any idea if it was a man or a woman? Young or old? Ethnic? Anything?”

  NO.

  “No idea at all?”

  NONE.

  Kasteel scanned the floor and the rest of the room for signs of intrusion. He stepped around in the unit, glancing here and there, studying it, looking, searching. He found nothing.

  “A friend of mine said Abaddon was someone whose face couldn’t be remembered. Who didn’t belong here at the Castle but who couldn’t leave.”

  LIKE YOU?

  “I suppose so, except I never clipped a brain damaged octogenarian in my life.”

  IT SAID YOU WERE MARKED.

  “Me? How did he mention me?”

  HE CALLED YOU THE OTHER ONE. HE SAID YOU WERE MARKED. HE SAID YOU WERE TOUCHED BY PLAGUE.

  There it was again. Abaddon claiming Kasteel was marked, and carried a plague that had murdered his firstborn Abaddon going for the sweet spot, the knife in the wound, breaking him along his greater fractures. Kasteel looked at the door and thought, Where are you, destroyer? When are you going to face me?

  THANK YOU FOR COMING.

  “I told you I would.”

  YES YOU DID.

  “Same thing as before. If he comes around again, call me.”

  Chester Milgrom, sixty-two, recuperating from major heart surgery, alone, met Kasteel’s eyes. He licked his lips and looked extremely anxious that he couldn’t speak. He started to wave his hands angrily at his ventilator tube.

  “Don’t be so upset, it’s keeping you alive, right?”

  Chester stared at the paper. He took his time writing. The words formed slowly. Chester had something deep to say and wanted to lengthen the moment so Kasteel would feel it too. So that he’d understand the enormity of what was being written. Kasteel did. He knew what it was going to be. He knew the truth of the matter because the part of him that was still an average family man felt the same way.

  I’M SCARED.

  Kasteel and Hedgwick were playing with the cancer kids who were being entertained by a clown named Boffo. Boffo had no balloons but he was juggling rubber balls, bouncing them all over the place, off the walls, off the machinery, off the kids’ round bald heads. Some of the homeless kids were in there too, playing the way you had to play with the kids on your block and in your neighborhood. The homeless kids had the cancer kids, and they were all much happier for it.

  The homeless mothers of the homeless kids made sure they scrubbed their children extremely well. Just because you had no real roots left after the bank took your house, after the job booted you without your pension or 401k, didn’t mean your children had to stand out as dirty, despairing, stupid, or much different at all from the sick kids watching Boffo closely and laughing at his tricks. Boffo had a cane and a top hat he used as he stumbled along around the kids, sort of dancing, tripping, pretending to fall into the machinery, squeezing his little arooga horn. The children loved him.

  “He’s not very accomplished,” Hedgwick said sadly.

  “You’re right. He’s not very funny.”

  “Children are so easily pleased.”

  “Most of them. Sometimes.”

  “It’s a wonder why so many kids are miserable then.”

  “Not much of a wonder.”

  “No. But look at them. Terminal cases. Homeless. Hungry. Don’t even own a single toy of their own. And they laugh and laugh at a third-rate clown. Boffo doesn’t even have big shoes. I always liked clowns with big shoes. Exploding shoes, some of them.”

  Kasteel had taken Eddie to the circus one time and Eddie had gone nuts for the clowns. None of this, Well, everybody is really afraid of clowns sort of thing with Eddie. The kid had laughed and spun his little blue light and eaten his popcorn and shouted and screamed and clapped like crazy. When the little car pulled up and forty-three clowns climbed out of it Eddie was stunned and thought for sure clowns were magical and could hide in little places. For about a week afterward he checked under the bed, in his dresser drawers, in the cereal cabinet expecting twenty or thirty clowns to parade out. When he started to get sick Kasteel hired clowns to come to the house and entertain the boy and his friends, and most of those guys didn’t have big exploding shoes either.

  “You’re thinking about your son,” Hedge said.

  “Yes.”

  “He liked clowns?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think he would’ve laughed at Boffo here?”

  “Probably, he laughed at all the others, and some of them were pretty bad too.”

  “There’s something about this one though.”

  “I know, I feel it too. Maybe it’s just one of the homeless fathers trying to bring a little joy to his kids.”

  “That cane, he holds it like he wants to break it over their little crowns and shatter their skulls.”

  “Boffo’s got some problems.”

  “Boffo is definitely unboffo.”

  More kids piled into the room. The nurses didn’t mind. The nurses never minded anything, so far as Kasteel could tell. The woman, Mary, spotted him from a
cross the room and gave a tentative wave. He waved back. Her kid was guffawing again. Mary had gotten her hands on some more milk containers and eased the cardboard spout to the child’s mouth every so often.

  Just as Boffo started finishing up, doing a little dance, miming some goofy nonsense, Beth and John showed up. Kasteel got to his feet. The children clapped, the nurses clapped, the homeless clapped, Boffo took his bows. Hedgwick spotted his dead father across the room and started crying for his daddy. Beth texted Kasteel. WE CAME TO VISIT BRYCE BUT HE’S NOT IN HIS ROOM.

  John’s arm was out of the sling. Kasteel asked how things were going. Beth said Bryce was seeing a hospital therapist. He wanted to work on the troubles in the marriage. She’d gotten herself a lawyer and was seeing how much she could take him for. She wanted out. She wasn’t going to take another chance on her little prick husband. She had to protect herself and her son first. But until she could get things going she put a false face on and pretended to be the perfect wife. Anything to keep him happy until she could run.

  Kasteel said that he would escort her around if she needed it, in case Bryce ever got mean again.

  She said he wasn’t mean. The ass kicking Kasteel had given him had done the job. He’d changed. He seemed to change.

  IT COULD BE AN ACT, he wrote.

  I KNOW.

  DON’T LEAVE YOUR SON ALONE WITH HIM.

  NEVER.

  YOU HANDLING THE BILLS OKAY?

  WE’RE ON AN INDIGENT PLAN. I WORRY ABOUT LOSING THE HOUSE.

  A LITTLE PRICK LIKE BRYCE MUST HAVE MONEY TUCKED AWAY. LOOK FOR BANK DEPOSIT BOXES. CHECK THE FLOOR OF YOUR CLOSET. THE SPARE TIRE. HE’LL HAVE SOME CASH HIDDEN. FLASH IS PART OF PRIDE, AND PRIDE IS EVERYTHING TO HIM.

  HE HAS NO PRIDE.

  PRIDE MEANING ‘SHOWING OFF’ AND ‘NOT BEING EMBARRASSED.’

  She stared around at the homeless families, the terror beneath the smiles, the desperation swirling in their eyes, the kids oblivious the way they should be. John didn’t smile, grin, laugh, nothing. Boffo did an especially bad job on him. The kid glared. He cocked his head at the people around him, trying to figure them out in relation to himself, wondering who was worse off, who could defend themselves, who was at the mercy of fate. He squeezed and released the fist of his broken arm, doing a series of exercises to keep the arm strong.

  Hedge said, “You’re being rude, not paying attention.”

  “I’m paying attention.”

  “My father says you’re not.”

  “Your father is dead and he’s wrong.”

  “Who are you talking to there?”

  “A friend.”

  “You don’t have friends. You can’t have friends if you have no name.”

  “You’re my friend, Hedge.”

  “Yes,” Hedge admitted, and reached out and began stroking the side of Kasteel’s face. Beth saw this and smiled for some reason. John cocked his head the other way and watched Hedge touching Kasteel and shook his head a little like he didn’t understand or couldn’t believe there were those who weren’t always trying to batter you up and down your own living room.

  Boffo twirled his top hat on the end of his cane, let it drop onto his head, and took another bow. The children cheered. Hedge gave a courteous round of applause. Hedge’s dead father, who knew. Kasteel watched John, hoping the kid would bounce back again. He was afraid the Castle would steal him from his mother, and the boy would be another sacrifice standing at the top of the Fool’s tower, bonemeal for future gardens.

  Three days later, about four am, after Kasteel had checked on Chester Milgrom twice, Kasteel was lying in Operating Theater 3 trying to sleep. The empty stadium seats surrounding the table full of faces from his dreams. He saw cops and pro heisters he’d worked with before, the guys who’d been loyal and those who’d betrayed him, the bulls and the cons, the patients and the doctors. Conrad and Watkins were up there, watching him. The German nurses, Merilee Himes’s family members, the hundreds of sick and dying he’d sat with in the ER waiting room. Kathy was there. Eddie wasn’t.

  Kasteel turned over and pressed his face to the cool pillow, the thin sheets with holes cut out they’d place over a patient. A perfect square so they could make a perfect incision into the chest, the belly, the brain. Kasteel wondered if he laid here long enough if some surgeon’s staff would gather around him and hook up the hardware and just start cutting, since that’s what they did. If you laid on the table long enough, someone would come along and take away an organ or two, or stick in a pacemaker or a stent, or just start running bypasses.

  Kasteel sneezed. His eyes watered. Something was wrong with the air.

  He knew what the smell was though he’d never smelled it before. And he knew where it was coming from even though he couldn’t have known where it was coming from. The ventilation system was more than powerful enough to keep the air clean. Except it wasn’t.

  Kasteel didn’t think about it. He let the Castle move him to where he needed to be. He followed the perfect walls until they were the crumbling brick of the original hospital. His feet carried him to the elevators and then down, down, down, until he was back in the morgue where he’d made his point to Tracy the candy striper and her deviant friends. He walked among the dead the way he had that night. He passed the vaults and the dead whispered to him, or he whispered to them.

  He saw signs around him that were easily recognizable. A splash of blood. An autopsy scale knocked over, a gurney spun aside. A few fibers stuck to a countertop, a clump of scalp and hair. Maybe it had been an accident. Maybe someone had just fought for his life. Kasteel held his nose. The smell was insane. He followed through the twisting chilly rooms of the morgue, past the freezers, to the crematorium.

  He heard the attendant humming and laughing to himself. He talked. He cursed. He was hateful, and his actions hadn’t bled off any of the venom at all. Kasteel could see how it could happen, alone down here with corpses. A lonely man was an inch away from madness. The poison was all still there, locked up inside him, continually firing up his already overheated mind.

  The morgue attendant was still working on the girl. He was sixty, in solid shape, a lot of his hair gone but what was left he thickened with the proper gels, kept it trim, shiny, youthful. Lots of defoliants, his own teeth, athletic movements. A simple gold band wedding ring, much like Kasteel’s. The kind of older man that a young girl would go for. Based on his mutterings, Kasteel was able to put the story together. The attendant was a sugar daddy. The girl wanted more cash. She wanted him to get out of the marriage. He was torn. He hated his wife but had the kids and grandkids and neighbors to think about. He was comfortable with his station and status in life. The girl was naive, immature, fucking dumb, really, but she was great in bed. He hated listening to her. He didn’t want her except when she was naked, on her knees, under the sheets. Same old story.

  He didn’t mean to kill her, except he did. The rage built up and tore free of him and while she was putting the touch to him, maybe slyly threatening, maybe just coming right out with it, he was thinking the things he’d thought a thousand lonely nights down here. How easy it would be to dispose of your troubles. This was the place to get rid of the evidence. To hide the flesh, to remove forensics. He should’ve cleaned up where it had happened first, soaped away the blood, mopped up, put the scale back in the right place. But no one ever came down here to check on things. It was just him and the dead bodies and occasionally his girlfriend. Now she was dead too.

  “What did you do?” Kasteel asked.

  The attendant turned. He was still grinning a little, happy the deed was done. He didn’t jump at the sound of Kasteel’s voice, wasn’t worried at all. Maybe he’d completely cracked, maybe he was still in shock.

  The body was in pieces, along with dozens of others. The amputated arms, the failed surgeries, the tumor-riddled wasted remainders of wasted people. And there, her head, staring back at Kasteel with blue helpless eyes. No older than twenty-one, young enough, perhaps, to be
forgiven for putting a man in a bad spot. He should’ve known better than to allow it to happen.

  “You’re burning someone alive,” Kasteel said.

  The attendant shaking his head. “No.”

  “I can smell it.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I can. You killed her. Only a few minutes ago. The whole hospital reeks of what you’ve done.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Not for me. You murdered her. You’re planning on disposing her in fire. But that will only make it worse. What you burn will turn to ash and the ash will rise into the sky and fall on you like dark rain for the rest of your life. Don’t you know that? She’ll be in the dirt, the air, the dust.”

  “You–”

  The attendant turned to the butchered girl, reached out and touched her here and there, her red lips, her arm, her belly, her breast. Kasteel counted fourteen pieces. Once he’d started sawing he just couldn’t stop.

  Realization was dawning on the attendant. His shoulders slumped. The smile left his lips. His eyes were beginning to spin. He looked at the saws and scalpels and other instruments he had used on the girl, and then looked at Kasteel as if he might try to attack and run. Kasteel just stood there, waiting. It was already over. It was over because the Castle said it was over.

  “Go tell a cop,” Kasteel ordered.

  “What?”

  “Go. Now. Tell the police. Turn yourself in. We can’t have you in the Castle.”

  “You can’t have...?”

  “No. The Castle wants you gone. Oh, before you go, call Admin and have a replacement sent down here.”

  The attendant got on the phone and called in his replacement. He then called the police and said that he was very sorry. He said he didn’t know why he had done what he had done. He gave his name, the name of the girl, her address, and the phone number of her parents. He said he didn’t know why he was talking so much except he couldn’t stop. He apologized to the police over and over. He said he hoped someone would tell his wife. The attendant sobbed for about thirty seconds and then regained his composure. He explained in great detail exactly what he had done to the girl and her corpse. Kasteel left.