THE WALLS OF THE CASTLE

Tom Piccirilli

THE WALLS OF THE CASTLE

Tom Piccirilli
© 2012 Tom Piccirilli

This edition of The Walls of the Castle
© 2013 Dark Regions Press

Cover and interior artwork
© 2012 Santiago Caruso

Front cover design by Dave Barnett

This edition of The Walls of the Castle
interior layout and design by Chris Morey

Edited by Chris Morey

Black Labyrinth

An imprint of ten psychological horror novels and novellas from the living masters of dark fiction illustrated by Santiago Caruso. Available in ebook, trade paperback and premium Black Labyrinth signed limited edition hardcovers.

Book I: Tom Piccirilli
Book II: Joe R. Lansdale (Kickstarter begins on Tuesday, October 8th)

Find details about the October 8th Kickstarter for Black Labyrinth Book II at the end of this ebook.

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“Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.”

― Philip K. Dick

This is a story of grief, madness and hope.

Table of Contents

Start

Midpoint

End

For everyone with a sorrow that can’t be set down, a patch of night that owns your heart, a recurring dream that never stops calling, a memory with claws, a treasure stolen from the sand, a slashing regret, a face you no longer recognize, a last meager hope that remains beyond your grasp, THE WALLS OF THE CASTLE is for you–

&

For Thomas Tessier

His son had been dead for two weeks, in the ground ten days, he was told, and Kasteel was still sitting in the ICU waiting area, spooking the nurses.  He was so pale now that the deep old scars hidden by his usually dark olive coloring looked fresh and vicious.

The staff no longer called him sir.  They no longer offered to fetch him coffee.  They eyed him suspiciously and twice invited him to speak with a grief counselor.  They gave him bad directions to the psych wing.  He already knew the hospital better than any of them.  Kasteel remained polite, talkative, and amicable, but he just wouldn’t leave.  So the administration sent up two tight-faced, no-neck security guards to throw him the fuck out.

He’d lost a lot of muscle mass eating nothing but cafeteria food the last four months.  The incessant crying had left him dehydrated and salt-deprived.  The lack of sunlight had given him a Vitamin D deficiency that he was trying to combat with pills stolen from the dispensary.  His back was in bad shape from sleeping on waiting room benches and operating theater tables.  When they hauled him to his feet his lower vertebrae cracked as loud as a shot from a snub .32.

Their name badges read Conrad and Watkins.  They were cut from the same granite as the bulls in Sing.  Angry, icy-eyed men who liked to parcel out punishment because it gave their lives momentary purpose, provided definition, and made them feel self-righteous.

They pulled disgusted faces when they caught a whiff of him.  Kasteel had been wearing the same ill-fitting clothes for five weeks, stolen from a prostate cancer patient who’d died on the table in September.  He smelled like the ass-end of a morgue.

They shoved him along with their truncheons and rapped him hard in the back of the thighs.  He held himself in check until they were around the corner from the elevator, and then he fought dirty as hell.  He cut loose, letting some of the savage tension go.  He hooked Watkins under the heart and threw a couple of tight jabs into Conrad’s jaw.  Six months ago he could’ve taken both easily.  But he was weak from lost electrolytes and lack of sleep, and they quickly overpowered him.  After barely a minute of brawling they clubbed him to his knees and stomped his guts until he vomited bile.

It went too far and they knew it.  They were under orders not to make a scene.  Kasteel’s nose and mouth pulsed blood and his beard was dripping.   Watkins said, “Shit,” and wiped his hands clean on Kasteel’s shirt.

They didn’t realize they were so close to the elevators.  They discussed alternate routes through the Castle, following the chipped, outdated color coded lines painted on the floors.

They grabbed him under the arms almost gently this time and carried his limp body between them.  They walked corridor after corridor, Watkins swiping his key card and shouldering through the fire doors.  They were getting anxious and angry again.  Kasteel wondered if they were trying to take him to the psych wing.  This was the way they sometimes brought the disassociatives, depressives, catatonic cases, the biters, nyctaphobes, narcoleptics, nymphos, multiple personality disorders, paranoiacs, schizoids, and the chronic masturbators.

Instead, they finally reached another set of elevators, hit the button for the ground floor and worked his kidneys for a couple of floors on the way down.  It wasn’t enough to do anything more than make him piss blood for few days.  He’d been kicked around a lot worse in the showers of C-Block at Sing.  Funny how many Aryans were queer when Adolph hated the rainbow brigade.  Maybe not so funny when you got down to it, but he found himself grinning.  He tried not to laugh, but for some reason the need was there.  He bit his tongue but a chuckle still floated up from deep inside his chest.

“What are you so happy about, asshole?”

Watkins had punched the wrong button and watched frantically as they continued to descend–3, 2, 1, P5, P4, P3–into the underground parking lots.  Watkins let out a small grunt of frustration.  They dragged Kasteel through F14, sub-level 3, this particular parking area reserved for visiting cardiologists and pulmonary specialists.  There were red arrows all over the place, pointing in every direction.  There were no exit signs.

A distant noise made Conrad call, “Hello?”

Kasteel laughed again.

For the next twenty minutes Conrad and Watkins squabbled over directions, growing more and more tense and anxious as they tried to find the outer door.  They were nowhere near it.  Their lips were tight with confusion and irritation.  Kasteel wished he had a cigarette.

The Castle always got people twisted around.  The Castle didn’t let you go unless it wanted you to go.

They circled and spiraled and tried to follow the red arrows.  Conrad kept calling, “Hello?  Hello?”

Watkins said, “Who in the fuck are you saying hello to?  There’s nobody here.”

“Somebody’s got to be here, look at the cars.  We just passed three Mercedes.”

“They’re not here, they’re in the hospital.”

“Someone might be walking from here into the hospital or back out again.”

“Someone might be except nobody is.”

Eventually they got back in the elevator and up to the ground floor.  They ushered Kasteel down a few more hallways, past the university clinic for child medicine.  Kasteel knew he looked like death but couldn’t help waving to the bald, terminal kids through the large plate glass window as they passed by.  He thought of his son but he couldn’t remember his son’s name or face.  A few kids waved back.

Watkins said, “Breaks your heart.”

“Yeah.”

“They ought to lighten the place up some.”

“What do you mean?”

“There should be some...I don’t know.  Board games.  These kids would probably enjoy a few board games.”

“Some balloons would be nice.”

“Yeah, balloons.”

Yeah, balloons, Kasteel thought.  In a sterile environment with sixty percent oxygen content.  One static spark off the surface of a plastic balloon and you’d have an explosion as big as half a pound of C4 blowing out a bank vault door.

They hit the stairwell and went up another level.  They dead-ended at a series of locked labs and had to double-back and take the stairs back down.  Kasteel thought about his first day in Sing, surrounded by twenty million metric tons of concrete, thousands of cons, bulls, other fish, other strings, pro heisters who’d taken a bad fall, old-time juggers who’d been in the can for fifty years.

They entered an older part of the Castle, where security hadn’t been updated to the use of key cards.  Lengths of untangled wiring hung from missing ceiling tile squares.  Soon the stonework of the original fortress began to show through.  The lighting changed.  The smell in the corridors grew heavy with mildew and rotting mortar.  Kasteel was feeling stronger, walking on his own, the ache in his kidneys only a dull passive discomfort.

Conrad and Watkins snapped and barked at each other.  They squared their shoulders and went nose to nose, rattled.

“Where the hell are we?”

“Turn left.”

“Why left?”

“Go left.”

“I heard you.  I’d like to know why.”

“Just fucking go left!”

Kasteel knew exactly where they were.  They’d gotten turned around and were heading towards the inside court leading to the Fool’s Tower.

Twelve stories high, the tower had originally been considered a “praying pavilion” though no religious persuasion was reflected in its construction.  Vertical window slits appeared in the brickwork on each of the open floors. At one time you could go in, meditate, and commune with your higher power or just sob your guts out while your loved ones died inside the Castle.  On bright days shafts of sunlight would slant within like purifying divine radiance.  At night, mercurial silver moonlight would rain down inside.

After World War II it was converted into a transformer station.  After Vietnam the remains of the original stone tower were restored as a kind of a memorial, though there were no plaques or statues to tell anyone what kind of memorial it was supposed to be.  It became the place where you went and begged the powers that be until you couldn’t speak any longer.  Over the last ten years there were at least three cases where the bereaved committed suicide by leaping from the top turret into the courtyard gardens below.  Another tried but suffered only severe brain damage and spinal injuries.  He was still around, a vegetable on life support over on Ward Six for the last eight years. Kasteel visited on occasion.

The administration hastily bricked and cemented the doors up, but the Catholics decided the place was too much like an ancient church and wanted it reopened.  The Archbishop even bitched about it in a press conference so Admin was forced to restore it completely even before the south wing that led out to the tower was finished.

Conrad and Watkins were starting to get a little flipped out, bored, tired, and their shift was about to end.  They seemed like children that had wandered too far away from their parents, Hansel and Gretel lost in the forest without their gingerbread.

“Okay, this is good enough,” Conrad said.

“Good enough?”

“Yeah.”

“Good enough for what?” Watkins asked.

“Far enough.”

“Far enough for what?”

“To let him go.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Shut up!”

They manhandled Kasteel out to the tower and then hurled him through the open arch.  He tumbled heavily across the cobblestone floor, trying not to smile.  The pain was nearly enjoyable when compared to the fuzzy, warm numbness of the past few months.

He spit blood, climbed to my feet, reached for his cigarettes, and lit one.  There was no smoking anywhere on the hospital premises, not even in the two-centuries old sections of the Castle that hadn’t been renovated yet.  He snorted smoke and it drifted against their merciless, blunt faces.  Conrad wanted to have another go at him, but Watkins held the prick back.

“Enough,” he said.

Conrad pointed at Kasteel.  “Don’t let us see you here again, you crazy son of a bitch.  Leave.  Go home.”

“Sure,” Kasteel said.  He didn’t have a home left to go home to.  He already was home.

The no-necks receded into the main building.  They were practically skipping when they got to the door.  Being outside for a couple of minutes had revitalized them, given them some grounding, focused them. Kasteel held his hand out into a ray of sunshine and let the sunlight fill his palm.  He wondered if the Castle was done screwing around with the no-neck guards.  Probably not.  They were bound to wander around lost for at least another hour or so.  Maybe longer.  Maybe forever.  He might find their corpses in operating theater #4 a few months from now.  The two of them with their hands around each other’s throat.

He laid at the base of the wrought-iron spiral stairway and stared up at the mortar of the first floor ceiling.  Admin had tried to restore the artwork there but budget cuts canceled the project about halfway through.  Now all you saw was a small portion of some gorgeous tableau, a choir of celestial beings that might have been archangels holding swords but without wings, children staring up in awe, a bloated orange hunter’s moon being clutched in an enormous deific fist.  He was still surprised the Catholics had ever figured this for a church.  If anything, he vibed paganism.

The pain in his side made him  take short sips of air.  He reached into his back pocket and came up with stolen bottles of Percocet, Xanax, Oxycontin, Valium, Codeine, Vicodin, vitamin B, C, D, and zinc.  He mixed a handful of pills and tossed them back, dry.

He heard footsteps at the top of the staircase.  Someone was coming down.

Chiseled above him across the doorway arch was KASTEEL.

It was the Dutch word for Castle.

He crooked his finger and spelled out names in the dust.

EDDIE.

KATHY.

He started to pray out of instinct.  The words had been there since childhood, and they continued to echo down the years, through his time in Sing, at the beginning of Eddie’s illness and again at the very end.  He’d done so much praying here the past four months that the prayers still wanted to break from him.  It was pointless, and he’d always known it was pointless, but you did whatever you could when your boy was dying.  You begged and you wept and you performed whatever acts of contrition you thought might pay your debt so the big gun upstairs didn’t send an angel with a burning sword to take your firstborn.  You cleaned out ten years’ worth of cached money and fenced stolen goods to pay for experimental treatments.  You huddled with your wife, on your knees, and when your wife told you it was time to go, you let her leave on her own and you groveled there alone.

When she told you that you needed help you went to the “very good doctor” that her friends had suggested.  You sat there in the lady shrink’s office and you tried to look interested and emphatic and open to changing your behavior.  You put on a good show.  You nodded and “uh hmmed” your ass off.  You held tight to Kathy’s hand in a show of solidarity.  You answered all the questions about your mother and father and brothers, your months in juvie, being a car thief, a wheelman, a cat burglar, the things you had to do to survive Sing.  You told the truth.  Kathy knew it all.  The doc sucked air between her teeth a few times.

Then the bitch asked, “If the unthinkable happens and your son dies–”

You killed her a hundred times in your head in maybe ten seconds, still holding Kathy’s hand.  Kath with her chin up, trying to deal with the inevitable, listening to this woman like she would have any answers about how to live without your child, the best thing in your life, the only thing besides Kath that mattered, and yes, his death, though inevitable, was utterly unthinkable.  You moved your mind and soul away from it the way you’d back up from someone slashing at you with a shiv.  There was nothing else to do.

You stood then, stone still in the middle of her office, and stared at her.  Kathy groped for your hand but she couldn’t budge it from your side.  You have strong hands.  Your hands have killed, your hands have done incredible things.  Your hands held your boy gently when he was born and you thought that with this child you could live the life you were supposed to live.  Straight, normal, without violence, and it had been that way for eight years, until Eddie began to get sick, and your boy began to die in front of your eyes.

The shrink, she couldn’t handle staring at you anymore, the expression on your face too blank yet intense for a normal person to handle.  Kathy spoke, rattling on and on, and meanwhile you just stood there in the office, wondering what kind of psychiatrist would dare to ask someone what they would do or feel if the unthinkable should happen.  How could someone ever know until it happened, until it began to happen, the way it began to happen when the specialists came and stopped by on their way to their golf games, four am, only to find you lying in bed with your arms around your son.  And the specialists always put out by finding you there, telling you, “You’re not allowed to be here.  Visiting hours aren’t until–” You knew exactly when visiting hours were, but you were going to stay with your boy no matter what.  Security threw you out again and again, but how do you keep out a man who spent most of his life sneaking into warehouses, jewelry stores, and banks.  You once killed a man by stuffing a bar of soap down his throat in the showers at Sing.  How could any of these people ever hope to understand what you were, what you’d done, what your son meant to you.  Even Kathy had no idea until the end.

Kasteel must’ve passed out for a few minutes in the pool of warm sunlight at the bottom of the Fool’s Tower.  When he opened his eyes again his cigarette had gone out and Hedgwick was leaning over him.

“Do you have any Percocet?” he asked.

It took Kasteel three tries to find his voice.  “I just took the last of them.  You want Codeine?”

He reared in disgust.  “Christ, no, it reacts badly with the Lithium.  And it gives me the runs.”  He felt around in his pockets.  “You running low on cigarettes?”

“Yes.”

He handed Kasteel a couple packs of Lucky Strikes.  Hedgwick’s mother sent him a care package twice a week and he used the contents to barter with, the same way they did it in prison.  Kasteel found his lighter and relit his cigarette.

Hedgwick was twenty-five, stood six-one, slim, with waving, wild curly blonde hair that all the young nurses liked.  His wide dark eyes glowed like black embers, and when he hit you with his glare full-on you knew this was how zealots or revolutionaries stared into a crowd.  He was wearing his thick fluffy red robe and cartwheeling clown PJs today.  He’d traded away his sophisticated leather slippers and now wore purple bunnies.  The bunnies suited him better.

His pockets bulged and Kasteel could smell mayonnaise and ham that had gone bad.  He had a thing about packing ham sandwiches and never eating them.  He sometimes had three or four stuffed in his robe.  It had something to do with the way his mother used to make his father lunch every day when Hedgwick was a kid.  He’d ask his father for a bite of the sandwich before the man left, and his father would unseal the wax paper and let his son nibble at a corner.  His old man worked high steel.  One day he took a wrong step and fell sixteen floors into a newly poured section of foundation.  There was no way for them to get him out so they let the concrete seal around his corpse and dedicated the building to him.

When Hedgwick got older he used to call in bomb threats to the building and run around naked trying to chase his father’s ghost out of the place.

Hedgwick said he still saw and even talked to his father’s phantom occasionally.  He said his old man looked much the same, hadn’t aged, was stuck in time and space, moved very slowly and didn’t seem to notice that Hedgwick or anybody else was around.  He said the psychiatrists had yet to prove to him that his father’s ghost didn’t exist.  He didn’t blame the shrinks for failing in that regard since it was impossible to prove a negative.

He woke screaming some nights gagging and gasping, imagining himself slowly drowning in millions of metric tons of concrete.  He told Kasteel that the orderlies in Ward Eight sometimes would stage death matches between the paranoids, the firebugs, chronic masturbators, bi-polars, claustrophobes, walking comatose, the sociopaths, and depressives, and bet on the outcomes.  Kasteel doubted a lot of what Hedgwick told him, but he wasn’t sure that he doubted that.

Hedgwick laid on the floor beside Kasteel and traced the names in the dust.  He spoke them aloud, something Kasteel could no longer do.

“Eddie.  Kathy.”

Kasteel shut his eyes.  Hedgwick ran a hand through Kasteel’s gray patch.  He had a thing about gray patches because his father had had a gray patch. Kasteel didn’t mind it most of the time but now he knocked the kid’s hand aside, turned over and spit more blood.

“ I...I’m sorry,” Hedgwick whispered.  “I’m sorry I didn’t help you.  I was frightened.  I followed you through the halls.  I saw what they did.  I should have helped.  My father would have helped.  He was strong.  He had big muscles.  He helped people.”

“It’s okay, Hedge.  You did the right thing.”

“In the ward matches we at least have garbage can lid shields and two-by-fours with nails hammered through them.”

“It’s time for you to make some new sandwiches.  They’re going to take those away from you soon.”

“I know.  Maybe tomorrow Mom will bring more.”

Lying on the floor like that, listening to the rhythmic thrum of his breathing reminded Kasteel of the ventilator Eddie had been on, a ten million dollar machine rigged to force air in and out of his small, frail body.  A sob tried to work up Kasteel’s throat but it died long before it got there.

“Are you going to hurt them?” he asked.  “Those prick security guards who beat you?  Conrad and Watkins.”

Kasteel kept hissing while his bruised ribs clawed at him, scratching deep from the inside.  He needed to get them taped up soon.

“Do you think I should?”

“Yes.  Those bastards.  They’re thugs.  They’ve all failed the police psych exam because of violent behavioral tendencies.  So they’ve followed up with the next best job they could get that gives them handcuffs and billy clubs.  Admin is hiring the biggest and freshest of them, instead of the kindly grandpa types who have experience working with people.  Admin likes to keep a youthful healthy face.  The old men remind them too much of the geriatric wing, the stroke victims, the Alzheimer patients who wander around in their shitty diapers.”  He reached for Kasteel’s gray patch again.  “They shouldn’t bring more pain to a grieving father.”

Kasteel could find out where Conrad and Watkins lived.  He had access to all the staff files and hospital records.  He could visit their homes and creep their bedrooms while they slept and bring the goods to a variety of fences and have his cut sent back to Kathy.  He could hurt them.  He could rob them.  He could scare them. He could prove he was still alive, assuming he was.  Sometimes he felt like Hedge’s father, stuck out of time and place, moving slowly when he was moving at all.

Maybe tonight.

The Castle let him loose at night.  Sometimes.

KASTEEL.

Before the American Revolution, the original Castle consisted of five fortress‑like circular buildings constructed by the Dutch settlers of the area, who used it as a base stronghold to fight off Indian attacks. It grew into a village and then a town.  In its strict geometrical form and simplicity, the original compound was considered a high point of European classicism.  A military hospital was established during the war but was soon shifted to being an epidemic hostel during an outbreak of yellow fever.

Soon the emerging small city’s primary employer was the hospital.  Catering trades and smaller enterprises died off.  The Castle had its own bakery, butcher, ironworks, and cemetery.  After the worst of the epidemic had passed, disabled soldiers and their families were quartered in the epidemic wards. What had once been nearly two hundred acres of farming tract became the patient yard, student yard, craftsman center, the house supervisor yard, and a mental asylum.  Over the last hundred and fifty years the complex had attached to it a medical school, university campus, personnel lodging, child medicine clinics, and the mental‑scientific institute.

The Castle became a city unto itself.  Currently over nine thousand people were employed at the hospital. Sixteen hundred physicians and forty-five hundred health and nursing workers attended to the patients. The mental wing consisted of fifteen separate wards and kept a rotating staff of about two hundred psychiatrists and therapists.  Included among them were dozens of holistic healers in case your emotional disturbances ran in that direction.  If your chakras were out of alignment, your chi wasn’t flowing right, your crystals were too cloudy.

Annually, nearly a hundred thousand people were treated as in‑patients and another half‑million attend the Castle’s outpatient clinics. Along with the parking garages, geriatric facilities, coma wings, gardens, and rehab centers, the Castle compound covered more than two square miles.

You could read all the historical facts off plaques placed along the nature trails threading through the grounds.  The hospital had its own station on the TVs in the waiting rooms and clinics.  Admin had hired a pretty actress who’d never been sick a day in her life to promenade through the place and wave to doctors and show smiling pregnant women up in the maternity wards.

It took Kasteel twenty-five minutes of navigating the inner courtyards and moving from one medical building to the next before he finally made it to the ER.

It was another savage night.  Ambulances wheeled past, sirens whining like rampaging children, EMTs shouting, chubby nurses rushing back and forth, swinging their wide hips in uniforms two sizes too small.  Heart attack victims were wheeled past

A teenage girl was lying half on the curb, half in the street, clawing at her face, streaks of blood down her cheeks, wailing uncontrollably.  She was ten yards from the heart of the ER activity and no one else had seen her yet.  Kasteel rushed for the automatic doors wondering if they’d open for him, wondering if he still existed enough in this world to set off the electric eye.  He held his breath until he was through and standing outside once again.

He moved through the chill air to her side as she began to choke on her own vomit. Seemed like another OD whose friends had dumped her out in front and then driven off, afraid of being busted.  They couldn’t even walk her in.  They couldn’t even get her up out of the gutter.

Kasteel turned her over, cleared her breathing passageway, and called for help over his shoulder.  All the ER staff and EMTs were already busy.  He shouted louder but no one paid any attention.  She began convulsing as he was trying to get her up.  She was young but had been doing crank for a while.  Several of her teeth were missing and others were black shards.  She weighed almost nothing, meth-starved and burned down to ash.  With his joints creaking, his muscles like sandbags, his nervous system practically as wrecked as hers, he lifted her over his shoulder and carried her inside the ER.  The pain med cocktail was still doing its job, but the come down later was going to be bad.

The girl coughed up and spewed bile down his back.  It wasn’t going to make him smell much worse.  As he clutched her and hauled her forward they were immediately lost in a flood of groaning men, crying children, pregnant ladies, beaten tough guys, the crippled, the feverish, the hobbled, all them seated, vacant-faced, with eyes like his eyes, like twin slashes made in rotting fruit, waiting patiently while they suffered and went right on dying.

As Kasteel maneuvered among them she whimpered a word, perhaps “Calico...”  Sounded like she was calling out to a boyfriend.  Maybe admonishing him.

“Who’s that?” he asked.  “Keep talking to me.  Who’s Calico?”

“Cal...”

“Is he the one who left you?”

“Cal...!”

Her body thrashed as she convulsed again.  Kasteel started shouting, his tight voice full of centuries of dust, the decimated mortar of the Castle, the cremations in the morgue, the destroyed biological hazards, the dirt scrubbed from the nails of the surgeons after playing the back nine.  He shouted and the sound of him raised a wave of noise from the others, tired of sitting, tired of staving off death, tired of following rules.  They shouldered their way to the registration desk and started demanding to see a doctor.  The fat nurses formed a line, and so did the patients.  The lights flashed red out at the curb and the ambulances kept coming in and going out.

By the time he got her onto a free gurney she was barely breathing.  The stink of sex and urine wafted through the hall. He kept her mouth clear and muttered to her words of encouragement that he hoped would keep her conscious.  Her pitted face began to twitch.  Her eyes opened and rolled.  Her lips framed the word or name Calico again.  Two attendants shoved him aside and wheeled her away while a stern supervisor from Admin asked him for the girl’s name and insurance information.  He said he didn’t know.

Admin didn’t like hearing that.  Admin needed insurance information.  They could skip your name and address and whether you were allergic to penicillin, but they had to have insurance info.  He’d been run up and down the wall by the financial department.  His insurance was good.  He’d paid extra into it.  He figured the way things had gone for him in the world he was as likely to catch a bullet in the back as lung cancer.  He’d watched his old man die a long long horrible death from lung cancer, the docs taking small pieces of him for months and months until the man was hardly recognizable anymore.  Kasteel had been fifteen when the man died.  He never should have started smoking.  But he did.  It was one of his better vices, when you looked at them all together.

He had first-rate insurance, for first-rate machinery, and first-rate care for his boy, but in the end it would’ve been kinder if the kid hadn’t been hooked up to the tubes and ventilators and dialysis and everything else.  The boy so weak at the end he couldn’t eat, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t use the bathroom, couldn’t speak, couldn’t hold his head up, couldn’t die.

Admin asked again.  “Her insurance?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your relation to the patient?”

“There is none.  I found her on the curb.”

“Your name?”

Even check-in had a long line.  He watched a hangdog family of five, all of them sick and sullen, the kids not even whining, just wheezing, eyes red and spinning. Each of them waiting their turn, bleeding onto the floor, hacking up virus, swallowing pain.

Admin didn’t bother to raise her chin.  It was easier for her not to look.

“Your name, sir?” she asked again.

His name, like his son and his marriage and his freedom, had somehow slipped away from him.  He didn’t remember the old name anymore.

He said, “Kasteel.”

She wrote it down, typed it into the computer, and handed him a clipboard without meeting his eyes.  She underlined the insurance box with a red pen.  “Please fill out this paperwork, including insurance information.  When you’re done, return it to me.  Someone will see you shortly.”

“But I don’t need a doctor.”

“You need a doctor, sir.”

He took a half-hearted stab at the paperwork for both the girl and himself, handed the clipboard back to Admin and sat down among the others.

It took five hours.  Not bad for the Castle.

The doctor was young, under thirty, with short hair sculpted into place with double handfuls of mousse.  Lively brown eyes, a vivid smile, a lot of energy in his face.  One of the few ER doctors who could actually interact with you like you were still alive and not already on your way to the morgue.  His name was Burroughs.  He’d been on duty the night that Eddie was brought in.  He didn’t recognize Kasteel.

He had a good manner, friendly but not happy, the way some of them get.  Loud, incessant, beaming, guffawing, telling jokes and talking about Saturday night with the nurses while some kid bleeding from his ears moaned just a few feet away.

Burroughs flashed a penlight in Kasteel’s eyes checking for a concussion. He spotted all the meds in there but didn’t say anything about them.  Kasteel said, “What about the girl?”

“What girl?”

“The girl I brought in.  She was left in front of the ER, maybe twenty, looked like she was OD’ing on meth.”

“She’s stable and resting.”

Kasteel just nodded.  Sometimes the machinery and the meds and the specialists couldn’t do a damn thing, and then there were times when somehow it came out all right.  “When you transfer her, move her to Ward Nine.  Not Eight.”

“Why would you say that?” Burroughs asked.

Kasteel didn’t answer.  He sat there while Burroughs continued to examine him, noting the billy club bruises, the old knife scars, gunshot grazes, razor slashes, his history written in his flesh.

“Looks like a pretty bad brawl,” Burroughs said.  “Who’d you have it with?”

“Two assholes.”

“Have you reported it to the police?”

“No.”

“You need x-rays to makes sure your lung hasn’t been punctured.  You’re breathing heavily and if the lining of the lung has been breached, it could deflate.”

An intern wheeled him over to x-ray, where they took a full set of his chest.  Then they wheeled him back down again. Burroughs had already moved on to an old Asian lady who was yelling at him without any accent.  She was explaining about the benefits of caterpillar juice.  Burroughs listened attentively, the same way he had when Kasteel had carried Eddie in four months ago, his dark eyes utterly focused on the moment.  He spoke quickly and sharply, but he was all there, right with you, without any distractions.  He wrote out a scrip for the Chinese woman and then turned back to Kasteel.

He checked the results of the x-rays and pursed his lips.  “Hairline cracks in four ribs, but at least your lung hasn’t been perforated.  What are you on?”

Kasteel gave it his  best guess.  “Prozac, Xanax, codeine, zinc, assorted vitamins, and vicodin.”

“Are you under a personal doctor’s care?”

“What do you think?”

“I think not,” he said.  “You’re malnourished.  You need to eat more and eat better.  You already know you’re suffering from vitamin deficiencies.  Pills won’t be enough, you need to eat good food.  I’m going to tape you up and you probably won’t feel much where those bad ribs are concerned, but when the meds wear off you’re going to be in a lot of pain.”

Burroughs taped him up and he didn’t feel much of anything.  Then he heard another doc somewhere, one of the loud guffawing ones, and a nurse answering the call like some exotic animal in the brush, squealing, screeching, a laugh that went through your head like the cry of a beast caught in a trap.

“Why aren’t you eating or spending any time outdoors?” Burroughs asked.

“Been busy the last few months.”

“You work at home?”

“More or less.”

“You still need to eat right, get a proper amount of sleep, and spend time out in the fresh air.”

“I’ll try harder.”

The doc stared at Kasteel, going deep, and Kasteel looked back and saw the face of the man who had saved his gasping son’s life that first night, the beginning of the end.  Kasteel remained impressed with him, but also stabbed by awful memories.  Eddie fighting for air, Kasteel holding his boy in his arms, Kathy ahead of them and shoving her way into the ER, Admin asking about insurance.   Burroughs coming out, asking questions, Kasteel answering them one after the other, Burroughs shouting to interns, calling out code words and asking for 50ccs of one thing or the other.  Eddie terrified but not crying, the kid tough, not wanting to let Kasteel down, not wanting to disappoint.

“I’m not going to give you any scrips without doing blood work first.  But I am going to give you three shots of vitamin supplements.  It’ll help when you come down off the tranqs.  And I want you to come down off the tranqs.”

“I hear you, doc.”

“Do more than hear me.  Listen to me.”

“Right.”

Burroughs had Kasteel drop his pants and Kasteel took the shot in the meaty part of his thigh, almost the same spot where he’d been stabbed with a sharpened toothbrush shank in Sing. In a minute he felt sharper, more present, and alert, everything he didn’t want to be.

“Thanks,” Kasteel said.  Then added, “Remember what I said about the girl and Ward Eight.”

He hopped off the examining table and turned his back.  He had to get strong again.  He knew it.  He had to start stealing more food from the cafeteria.  He needed to put muscle back on.  He needed to keep guys like Conrad and Watkins off his back.  He needed to be able to carry twenty-year-old junkie girls over his shoulder.

As he was leaving he passed a cubicle where the privacy drapes were slightly parted.  A blonde-headed boy of about ten was sitting up on the table, kicking his heels against the metal side, bored and edgy and scared.  The metal drumming, thump, thump, thump, a slow and steady beat.  Kasteel’s pulse fell in sync with the pounding.  The kid’s face was white with pain but expressionless except for a shadowed puzzlement in his eyes.  The barest hint of a question furrowed his brow.

He was shirtless, well-muscled for a child.  His right arm had been pulled from the socket.  The intern was having trouble popping it back in, but all of his jostling and pushing just made the boy sweat harder and grow paler.  His chest was slathered.  His forearm was swollen badly, probably fractured.  No matter what they’d given him for the pain it wouldn’t be enough.  Kasteel could hear bone scraping bone as the boy’s shoulder finally snapped back into place.  The kid grunted and hissed through his teeth.  He handled pain well.

He had almost outgrown four or five faint burn scars on his belly and chest.  They were perfectly round, about the size of a quarter. They were from a cigar.

The kid’s mother stood beside him and ran her hand through his hair in a kind of nervous tic, the way Hedgwick did it.  She looked like she might pass out.  She looked like it was her arm that had been jerked so hard it had popped out.  Her heavily painted face was in tatters.  Her incessant silent tears had washed enough of her foundation away to show abrasions beneath.  Without the make-up and the bruises and the cut lip and the swollen jaw she would be pretty.

The kid stared into space.  His eyes had narrowed. He was full of rage but it hadn’t begun to eat him alive yet. There was still time to save him.

Burroughs would have caught it.  Burroughs would’ve called the cops.  Burroughs would have said something to them.  The intern was new, fresh, unsure of what to do about anything that fell outside his direct job description.  Maybe he didn’t notice.  Maybe he was at the end of a twelve hour shift and just wanted to sleep.

Kasteel walked out of the emergency room and through the front automatic doors.  He scanned the front parking lot until he found a Coup de Ville with MD tags illegally parked in a handicapped space.

He had his leather case of burglar’s tools inside the dead man’s jacket pocket and got the car door open with a slim jim in eight seconds.  The alarm bleated once before he snipped the wires beneath the dash.  Then he got comfortable behind the wheel, lit a cigarette, watched the ER doors, and waited in the darkness, starting to feel alive.

A half hour later the woman and her son stepped outside and proceeded across the lot.  The kid had a cast on his forearm and wore a sling.  When they were out of expanse of the bright lights of the ER entrance she began to stagger and then started to sob.  She slowly fell to her knees in front of the boy and pulled him to her gently.  He placed the side of his face against hers but his eyes were still empty except for the hate.  Kasteel lit another cigarette.

They got into a five-year-old Chevy Malibu.  The car had been in a lot of recent fender benders and scrapes, but no major accidents. The signs of road rage driving, nervous driving, too many with the fellas from work driving, rushing off in the middle of a rainy night driving.

He followed close behind.  There was no need to stay back four car lengths or keep to a different lane, the way he might’ve shadowed another heister to see if the guy was worth working with on the next job.

He kept right on them as they moved through town.  She drove slowly, with trepidation, and didn’t run any yellow lights.  She drove like she was heading towards her own execution.  The passenger seat was too high for Kasteel to see the boy, but he could imagine the kid sitting staunchly, that same anger building in him, the same question tearing at him.  It would be there for the rest of his life, through years of therapy and liquor and all his shattered relationships.  It would be there when he had his own son.  It might destroy him or it might make him a better man in the end.

When they came to a neighborhood in a new development, near a lake, near a park, near everything that helped to make you a happy family, she stopped dead in the middle of the road, gathering herself to continue on.  Kasteel dimmed his lights and pulled over to the curb.  He watched her as she thought about turning around and running.  He knew what was going through her head.  He knew what kinds of fantasies spun through your mind when you were faced with a moment of truth.

She tugged the wheel a little too hard to the right and the Chevy angled awkwardly and blocked the road.  She started to go into a three-point turn but she was so anxious it turned into a five-point, and then a seven-point, and then she backed up so fast she nearly ran into some garbage cans stacked on the sidewalk and almost took out the front quarter panel of the Coupe.  The boy laid the side of his head against the window.  His cast and sling were bright white in the darkness of the Chevy.

She continued to turn, nine-point, twelve-point, until she’d completed a 360 degree turn and was again faced the same way she had been when she entered the street.  She seemed to think there was no escape, and of course, there wasn’t.  She tipped down again towards the boy.  The kid leaned into her.  Kasteel watched it all ahead of him, backlit by dashboard light.  They were preparing themselves to meet the enemy.

He didn’t blame her at all.  He knew what it was like to be cornered, surrounded, to have nowhere to run.  You couldn’t do anything except put your hands over your head and wait there for them to either kick the shit out of you or, rarely, to show just a touch of mercy.

Finally she straightened out and coaxed the gas, headed home again.  A spasm of anxiety must’ve worked down through her leg because the car jumped, slowed, and jumped again as if she couldn’t hold her foot firmly down on the pedal.

Kasteel pulled away from the curb and began to follow again.  He could imagine the husband telling his friends that his wife was a shit driver.  Kasteel could see her smiling embarrassedly at barbecues and coffee klatches, assuming that she went out anymore.  If he allowed her to have friends anymore.  Kasteel could see him grinning at her, a world of agony hidden in his charm, pinching her chin, maybe giving her smooches, everybody else thinking, What a perfect couple, but she’s so quiet, so shy, and that kid, that kid always falling down, tripping, uncoordinated, hurting himself.

The woman pulled in to a new house on a new street in the new development, only a few saplings in the yard, no mature landscaping but lots of flowers bordering the split-rail fence and in front of the small porch. The garage door opened and she pulled in, and she and the kid got out of the car and held each other there for a second in the dim garage lighting.  Then the door came down again.

Kasteel parked two houses down on the opposite side of the clean, wide street.  All the houses were different but they all seemed the same.  Their details appeared to be fluid.  He saw them merging and flowing one into the next, like the corridors of the Castle.

He climbed out and crossed the lawn and looked through the front window.  The woman was standing in the living room staring flatly at her husband.  He was smaller than Kasteel was expecting.  Maybe that was part of it.  Short guy syndrome, always had to be right, always had to be up in other people’s faces, stewing, stubborn, a resentful little fucker.  In prison they were the cutters, the knifers, the stickers.  They’d run up and stab someone in the hip two or three times and then run off again.  You couldn’t just worry about the big bruisers, the bubbas and the giant Aryan skinheads you could see coming from halfway down the cellblock, you had to keep an eye out for those five foot nothing pricks with their hands cupped at their sides.

There were fresh flowers on the kitchen table.  He guessed there would be a new toy in the boy’s room, something the kid wouldn’t even be able to play with because of the broken arm.  A new baseball glove, a football, a hockey stick.  Something sports-related, probably because the father had always been puny, last chosen for a team at recess.  The kid’s eyes were rolling with pain and shock.  His body practically vibrated like a plucked violin string.

The husband was talking.  Kasteel could tell from the guy’s body language that the little prick was quickly overcoming his guilt and the anger was already reasserting itself.  He touched the kid’s head and patted him like he was the family dog.  He turned and pointed at the woman, emphasizing certain statements by poking the air.  Eventually he would poke her in the guts and in the chest, and then he would pinch and shove and punch.  Kasteel could see it as clearly as any score he’d ever planned in his life.

The swinging metal gate at the side of the house slid open smoothly as he slipped past.  Laid out on a tarp beside a charcoal barbecue were parts to the exhaust system of a ‘68 Chevy Nova.  His old man used to leave scattered car parts around the yard like this.  In the garage, on the patio, on the side of the house.  His mother was always shouting for somebody to clean the place up.  She’d find a half-finished carburetor in the laundry room.

They’d rebuild the cars together and sell them to the racers who met down at the abandoned airport strip.  Kasteel was twelve or thirteen, just starting to get into a little trouble, and he’d watch the dragsters flying down the ocean parkways hitting triple digits in 8.8 seconds.  His father was always paid in fat wedges of cash.  Later, when Kasteel was a driver, a wheelman, he’d be sitting outside of a bank and think of his father and the racers who bought his cars, and hear his mother yelling about the greasy handprints.

He checked the back door.  No alarm system, no deadbolt.  He tried the knob.  The door was loose in the frame but the lock held.  He slipped out his tools and gave himself a countdown of twenty seconds to get through.  It took fifteen.  He stepped into the house and could feel the tension and bad blood history soaked into the walls.

A pile of mail was on the kitchen table.  They were mostly unpaid bills for a Bryce Clarke.  Kasteel didn’t find anything with the woman’s name on it.

He felt a flutter of sympathy for the short shit.  Bill collectors, the IRS, the endless calls from the credit card agencies, the mortgage company, it could bend you, kill you from the inside, chase you out of your own head.  It could make you do a lot of things.  It couldn’t make you hit your wife.  It couldn’t make you break the bones of your own boy.

He chewed the name over.  Bryce.  It tasted sour in his mouth.  It offended him.

There was no beer in the fridge.  Whatever Bryce’s action was it wasn’t too many 40s after work.  Kasteel drank half a carton of juice then sat at the kitchen table and listened to Bryce Clarke murmuring apologies to his wife.  The deep anger underlined all his words, the hate tinged everything he said.  It was too much a part of him.  It would be there no matter what he said or how he tried to say it.  His inflection changed a bit every time he prodded the woman to stress significance.

Kasteel craned his neck and caught a glimpse of her.  She looked like a soldier readying herself for a suicide mission.  She was too demoralized and detached to even respond to Bryce, which only fueled his further contempt.

His  voice rose.  A plaintive whine worked through it, laced with a hint of hysteria.  “What, don’t you believe me?  I told you, it was the last time, Beth.  I’ll never do it again.  Christ, why can’t you believe me?  Why can’t you show a little faith in me?  John believes me.  Don’t you, John?”

The rage had quickly built up in him again.  His ragged breathing filled the house.  He couldn’t stay in the same spot any longer and started to stomp across the living room, his small feet making the bric-a-brac on the shelves shake.  Pictures fell.  Candles tipped out of their holders, rolled, and hit the floor.  Kasteel heard a repetitive sound like the fine whisper of a hand brushing silk and knew instantly what it was.  Bryce Clarke was now stroking his son’s head.

“I’m going to give him a bath,” Beth Clarke said.  “And put him to bed.”

“I’m not finished yet.”

“Finished with what?”

“Speaking to my son.”

“John’s tired.  He’s in pain.  He needs to rest and heal.”

“He needs to listen.  He needs to learn.”

“You’ve taught him enough already.”

More murmured apologies, this time spoken with a more exacting harshness, icy, slick.  He was digging in, finding his comfort zone, the guilt leaving him, his conscience chipping off like shale.   No one could hurt him, not even himself.  The constant sweep of his hand moving through the boy’s hair underscored his buzzing chatter, a deep growl growing in his timbre.  The kid kept silent.

Soon there was the rasping sound of wet pecks made by someone who didn’t know how to kiss.  Kasteel stood back in shadow and checked the living room.  The boy hadn’t moved an inch, as immutable as stone while his old man held and kissed his cheek.  He waited like Isaac for his father to slay him.

Kasteel finished off the orange juice and set the empty carton aside.  He found a vegetable medley platter in the fridge with dip and ate it silently while the pressure built within the house.  A barometer would be going crazy now, as if a hurricane were about to engulf the place.  Kasteel kept eating, feeling a little of the old strength coming back.  He opened some bottled water, wet a kitchen towel, and washed his face. As he pressed the cold damp cloth to his eyes he flashed on Kathy tending to his wounds.  Stitching up his cuts and burns and grazes, setting his broken fingers, giving him a sponge bath when he couldn’t get out of bed.

Finally Bryce Clarke was through.  He released the kid.  Beth was grinding her back teeth together so hard that it sounded like an Apache sharpening a stone dagger.  Bryce kissed the boy again, sloppy, skeevy, then gave him a swat on the ass.  Kasteel wondered if something more than rage was happening here.

“Goodnight, munchkin.  I love you.”

John didn’t seem to know which way to go.   His mother took his hand and led him upstairs.  She was still grinding her teeth.  Kasteel imagined her molars worn down to nubs, the dentist lecturing her about wearing a night guard.  A door shut heavily.  A lock was engaged.  A moment later, the rumbling groan of rushing water filled the home.

Kasteel stepped out of the kitchen and faced Bryce Clarke.

Up close he was a dashing little fucker.  Kasteel could see why she’d fallen for him.  Strong features with blunted edges, brash blue eyes, boy next door looks.  Blonde locks falling perfectly across his forehead, tips of his bangs in his eyes so he could give a little wag of the head and they’d flip so cutely.  A couple of old battle wounds, a tiny scar at one at the corner of his mouth, another angling from the corner of his eye.  The kind of scars that made women purr.  Not like Kasteel’s.

He spoke quietly.  “Hello, Bryce.  Let’s talk.”

Bryce Clarke reared away like a mad dog had snapped at him from the dark.  The back of his knees hit the coffee table and he almost went over.  He kept his balance and stood there wondering if he should put his hands up, if he should run, if he should cry out to his wife.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Someone who knows the truth about you.”

Bryce frowned, flipped his curls.  “What does that mean?”

“You know what that means.”

“Get out.  You get out of my house before I call the cops.”

He went for his cell and drew it from his pocket.  Kasteel snatched it from him.  Kasteel wasn’t the same man he once was, but he still had fast hands.

“What do you want?”

“Just to talk.”

“How did you get in here?”

Kasteel grinned at him.  “I don’t like your voice.”

He shifted his stance and squared his shoulders.  He could feel his own eyes growing amused.   The pain meds were wearing off but the vitamins and the juice and the veggie platter, all that healthy shit, oxygen, sugar, was rushing through his system.  It was like he was back in the yard, aware of everything, afraid of everything and nothing, not wanting trouble but willing to kill if he had to.

Bryce sneered.  “You fucking her?  Is that what this is?” he hissed.  “You are, aren’t you.  Or you want to, you stinking bastard.  Is that her smell on you?”

“Don’t you know?”

“It is.  I know it is.”

Bryce charged and threw a wild left.  Kasteel blocked it easily and chopped him lightly across the throat, sick of that voice, wondering how the woman could have stood it this long, how the boy hadn’t shot up a school or jumped off a cliff.  A voice like that, hissing, seething, full of venom, could sear you like a face full of kerosene.  Bryce was sent to his knees.  He gagged and hacked and glared.  His hate mutilated his features.  He showed no fear.  His eyes were clear.  Bryce didn’t go in for an indulgence of prescription or recreational drugs.  He took a six-count and then threw himself at Kasteel again.

Short guy, and untrained, but with some muscle to him, and a lot of heat.  He lashed out and caught Kasteel’s bad ribs.  Kasteel didn’t make a sound but his expression must’ve shown his pain because Bryce went to work on the area.  It hurt.  Bryce threw a lot of short jabs, worked his advantage and started in with tight hooks.  More jabs to Kasteel’s face.  Little prick threw about twenty unanswered shots.  It hurt, but it was part of the plan.

Kasteel knew about giving a beating and taking one.  You could fight through the pain.  Once you knew how it was easy.  You could even learn to like it.  The real beating went on inside.  When despair set in, when you were cut off from your reserves.  Kasteel let Bryce keep working away, and then backhanded the short fucker hard enough to split his smoochy lips.  Kasteel liked the balance of it, how Bryce was now a mirror of his wife.   Kasteel moved in and did it again.  Bryce’s eyes flared.  There was nothing quite as denigrating as being struck with a backhand.  It’s the way your old man hit you when you were a kid.  The humiliation was genetic, and it went back ten thousand generations.

“That ugly voice of yours has to go, Bryce,” Kasteel said, his own voice still a little gritty.  “Swallow red-hot embers.  Suck giant black dick.  But get rid of it.”  Kasteel punched him almost gently in the Adam’s apple.  Bryce thrashed and choked, fell back on the couch, and turned a nice shade of purple.  The running water shut off.  Kasteel waited until the guy had caught enough breath that he could hear what was about to be said.

He crouched, got in close, let him check out what ugly, real scars looked like.  “You’ve got stress in your life, Bryce, I understand that.  Frustrations, disappointments, defeats.  You’ve got issues.  We all do. Maybe the worst of them has to do with your job.  You haven’t made your quota lately.  You’ve missed out on a couple of promotions you deserved.  You’ve got a tall boss who smirks at anyone under 5'7.  Something like that.  Maybe your old man used to smack you around.  Mom didn’t give you enough tit when you were a baby.  You’ve got problems with intimacy.  You’re impotent.  A closet fag.”

Count on that to get under his skin.  Bryce grunted and made a jump.  Kasteel slammed the flat of his palm under Bryce’s chin and enjoyed the hard crack of his jaws slamming together.  Bryce let loose with a strangled yelp and fell onto the floor.

Kasteel stared down at him.

“Or your older brother died in front of your eyes, run over in the middle of the street during a stickball game. Maybe you got gang-raped by your high school basketball team.  Hey, these things happen.”

And they did.  Kasteel reached down and took hold of the little prick’s shoulder and patted his back, the way a proud father does to his son, the way a friend lends support.  Bryce’s eyes spun and hardened.  His mouth leaked blood from both corners.

“But listen to this, Bryce.  I don’t care.  Nobody cares.  Not your co-workers, not your neighbors, not your wife or your kid.  We don’t care.  You haven’t been able to live with it, whatever it is.  Okay, fair enough, some of us have too great a burden.  Some of us can’t carry the load.  We’re tired.  We’re broken.  We’re ruined, we’re wrecked.”

Kasteel hefted Bryce to his feet, grabbed him by the scruff, and tossed him over the couch and almost through the front window.  Bryce managed a short scream of fear and pain, a weird warble almost like a newborn’s gasping cry.   A vase of flowers smashed and pink petals floated into his hair.  Kasteel wanted to keep this quiet but the vitamin shots had made him edgy too.  He hadn’t spoken this much to anyone besides Hedgwick in months.

The bathroom door opened slowly, tentatively.  The groaning sucking swirling glucking sounds of a bathtub draining made their way downstairs.  Beth was probably up there with her ear turned to listen.  Maybe she thought Bruce was going nuts, throwing things.  Maybe she heard Kasteel’s voice and wondered if he was another enemy or a potential savior.  He wanted to call to her, to tell her it was all right, but she wouldn’t trust him.  She’d have to make the decision from there, in moderate safety.

Kasteel stepped on Bryce’s chest and exerted a little pressure, just to keep his attention.

“So this is what you do.  You go find yourself a competent shrink.  Or a priest or a rabbi or a fucking Buddhist monk who’ll listen to you.  Or you can start self-medicating.  You throw back a couple of six-packs a night.  You pop percs, you steal scrips for vikes.  You fall asleep in the gutter covered in your vomit.  You pick up a hundred dollar a day coke habit.  You kick back with a crack pipe.  You let meth rot out your teeth while you pick your face apart.  You pay whores who’ll let you smack them around.  You become a barroom brawler. You go find yourself a twink boyfriend.”

Kasteel stepped on him harder.

“I don’t care what you do, so long as you resolve yourself.  You never lift a hand against your wife or boy again.”

His lips moved slightly.  Kasteel could see exactly what the prick was saying.  He knew Bryce was telling him to go fuck himself.  Bryce was someone who had to learn all his lessons the hard way, and no one harder than him had come along for the last little while.  Not until now.  But Kasteel didn’t want to have to do any real damage.  He didn’t want to sell what was left of his soul.  But it looked like it might have to go that way.

“I hate your voice, Bryce, but I need a response here.  Do you think you can resolve yourself or not?”

The little fucker’s tongue jutted and flapped.  It seemed like he might jump up and have another go, no matter how stupid that might be.  Bryce just wasn’t listening.  He wasn’t hearing the message.  Sometimes a man couldn’t learn.  He took it to the wall and then right through the rock.  Kasteel had known a lot of guys like him before.  He might even be like Bryce himself in some ways.  Incapable of change.  Incapable of living with some trauma, great or small, that had come to define his life.

Bryce’s gaze diverted.  Kasteel glanced up and she was halfway down the stairs, watching expressionless, watching them.  John stood beside her wearing fresh pajamas, his hair wet, wearing his sling.  Eddie never could dry his hair either, it seemed impossible for any kid to do a good job.  It used to drive Kathy berserk.  She’d go and do it for him, rubbing his hair down with a towel, taking her time to comb through his shaggy tow-head.  It would look perfect for about ten seconds and then it would be a mess again.  The symbols of our lives find us wherever we are, wherever we go.

Kasteel met Beth’s eyes.  She continued to wait and watch.  She wasn’t going to scream and come running at him with a frying pan.  She wasn’t going to wrap her arms around her husband and declare her mad love for him.  Everyone knew that it sometimes went down like that.  No matter how badly they were treated, the devil they knew was almost always better than starting over again.  You saw it happen every day.  He was glad it wasn’t going to happen now.

Bryce glared at her.  He still thought maybe she was screwing around.  He thought maybe she’d let Kasteel in to do some damage.  He tried speaking.  “Beth, what have you done?”

His voice was hardly there but what was there was pure rage.  Kasteel wondered where these kinds of guys found the energy.  Being that pissed for that long was wearing.  You had to be aware in the yard but always seething, always wanting to hurt somebody, it took a lot out of these guys.  They burned up over the years until there was hardly anything left in the end.

“I’m going to put you out now, Bryce, while we decide your fate.  You’ll either wake up and have a limp for the rest of your life or you won’t wake up at all.”

With that Kasteel stomped his forehead and put the little fucker down in the black.

Kasteel hadn’t wanted the kid to see that, even though it might be good for him.  It wasn’t Kasteel’s call to make.  The woman didn’t pull her son’s face against her skirt.  Kasteel waited for her to say something, ask a question, show some upset, but she didn’t bother.  She braced herself for whatever might happen next.  She was strong.  She had to be strong.

The boy looked at his father and then his mother and then at Kasteel.  He put his free hand to his cast and scratched at it like he didn’t even realize it was there.

Kasteel still hadn’t heard the kid speak and suddenly it felt imperative to do exactly that.  He had to hear the boy.  He wondered if he’d sound anything like Eddie.  He wondered if he’d ever see another kid in this world that wouldn’t remind him of Eddie.  It was one of the things that had spooked the lady shrink.  She had a couple kids herself, a boy and a girl, their photos framed on her desk, pointed outward.  Why outward?  Showing them off to the clients?  Hoping to incite feelings, discover dysfunction?  It had worked.  Kasteel had looked at her boy and asked question after question, thinking of Eddie, until Kathy tugged at his wrist to get him to shut up and the shrink turned the pictures back and eventually put them in her drawer.

“What’s your name?” Kasteel asked him.

John didn’t respond.  And he was a John, not a Johnny, not a JJ or a Jimmy John or a Jackie John.  He was a John.  Though maybe he wasn’t sure about that himself.  He seemed to have forgotten his name, or perhaps to have never known it.

“That’s okay,” Kasteel told him.  “Names are overrated.  I’ve had a lot of them.  Now I don’t have any.”

Beth didn’t seem to take that to heart, or understand what he meant.  She asked, “Who are you?”

Like everybody’s, his life had been full of shortcut answers to that question.  You tried to compact your response.  Nobody had patience for more than a few words.  You said, I’m the best two-story man in the tri-state area, which was probably true, or almost true.  You said, Prisoner #768259, sir.  You choked out, when they asked, I’m a reformed felon.  I’m a husband.  I’m a father.  You took a knee at your old man’s headstone and said, I’m a fuck-up, dad.

He cut through it all and simply responded, “I lost my son.  I won’t let you lose yours.”

Her face began to crimp and fall in on itself as a moan broke from her.  She stifled it almost instantly.  She put an arm around John and he barely noticed.

“He’s already lost.”

“There’s a chance you can save him.”

“Is there?”

“Maybe.”

She gestured at her husband.  “Are you going to kill him?”

He stared at her.  “Do you think I should?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think carefully.”

“Does he owe you money?”

“No.”

“Did he do something to you?”

“No.”

“Then–”

“I told you already.  I’m here for you and John.”

At the sound of his name the kid seemed to snap from his trance.  He blinked a few times, and yawned, and reached up and touched his wet hair.  He looked down at his father and seemed to consider the question.

Are you going to kill him?

You’d think there might be finality to it, but there wasn’t.  The question and the answer and the action, whatever that action turned out to be, would go on and on forever.  The consequences would ripple out across the world and down through your life forever.  Kasteel knew it.  So did the mother.  So did the boy.

Bryce lay there unconscious, the fury gone from his face, handsome, snoring softly.  Conscience only counts for so much.  Fear of prison even less.  She cocked her chin as she considered it.  He watched her weighing the extent of her own moral imperative.  She clenched and unclenched her hands.

“He’s going to be worse after this,” she said.  “A strange man in the house that beats him up?  He’ll think we’re lovers.”

“He already made that presumption.”

“He’s never trusted me, not even when I loved him.”

“Some guys are wired wrong.”

“Are you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you ever hit your wife or boy?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not wired wrong.”

“Yes, I am.  Just not in that way.”

“He’s going to be worse,” she repeated.

“Maybe he won’t be.  Maybe he’ll learn a lesson and come back to his senses.  He might change.”

“Is anyone capable of real change?”

The easy answer was yes.  People changed all the time, for the worse.  They got weaker, they got crazier, they got more broken.  Kasteel thought about a few guys in the joint who’d managed to turn their lives around.  Animals who’d managed to educate themselves behind bars, learn a bit of compassion, find God and their own humanity.  He could count them on one hand, but they existed.  It seemed possible.

“Would you really kill him if I asked you?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

She nodded, thought further on it, her hands squeezing tighter like she was struggling to hold on but was slipping.  She glanced at her son.  The kid glanced back.  He looked at Kasteel, his eyes like you were staring into miles and miles of night.

“I want to watch you hurt him,” she said.

“Okay.”

Kasteel propped Bryce’s leg up on the coffee table and then dropped on top of it.  The knee snapped and the leg bent back in the wrong direction.  He’d limp forever.  He’d be in the hospital for months.  He’d be in rehab for at least a year.  If he wasn’t going to change for the better anytime soon, then maybe at the end of the year he’d be a better man.

The agony woke Bryce up and he shrieked like a spoiled girl, threw up on himself, and passed out again.  The scream had reached into his son and shaken him up a little.  The kid looked angrily at his father.  Kasteel liked the fire in the kid’s eyes.  It also reminded him of Eddie when Eddie used to get pissed.

She said, “Is it enough?”

“You tell me.”

“He might kill us.”

“Give me your cell,” he told her.

“I don’t have one.”

“I’ll take his.”

“Why?”

“Because I need a phone.”

Kasteel had snatched Bryce’s cell from his hand but where had he put it after that?  He couldn’t remember.  He looked around at the mess in the living room, the overturned coffee table, the broken vase, the shit that had fallen off of shelves.  He spotted the phone on the carpet, grabbed and pocketed it.

“If you need me,” he said, “for anything, just call his number.”

“He’ll just cancel it.”

“Tell him if he does that I’ll break his other knee.”

Tears welled again and she let out one yawping sob that came from the center of her body and her soul.  She bent and put her face to the boy’s hair and cried into it.  The kid kept his eyes on Kasteel.  They had an understanding now.  They were partners in this thing.  He wanted Kasteel to know he would honor it.

In a few seconds she was done and her face cleared instantly.  She was a woman used to keeping her emotions under wraps, tied firmly, cuffed.

She asked, “How did you lose your son?”

He still didn’t know the answer to that.  He had listened to the doctors for months and hadn’t heard anything they said, none of it had made any sense.  They changed the story every few days.  First it was this, and then something else, and then they thought it had to do with an infection, and then a genetic illness, and then some kind of trouble with his heart, and it went on and on, surgery after surgery, machine after machine, signature after signature, the financial department calling the insurance company, the insurance company hassling him, until Eddie was alive but unable to speak, unable to see, and finally unresponsive, in a coma for weeks, and then in the ground the last ten days, so he was told.

There was no answer but Kasteel still felt like it was somehow his fault.  He knew in his heart that he had caused Eddie’s death in some unfathomable, unknowable way.

He said, “I made a mistake.”

“I’ve made a lot of them too.  Is that why this is happening?”

“Who knows? But it’s over now.  Pack up and leave or stay and wait to see what happens.  Either way, I’m on the other end of this phone if you need me.  I’ll be close.”  I turned to the kid.  “You heard what I said, right?”

John didn’t answer or respond with any kind of a gesture, but Kasteel knew he’d heard and that he’d call if he ever needed help.

“You need your sleep.  You should hit the sack.”

Beth led her son upstairs again.  John looked back once as if to ensure himself that the scene was real.  He’d be living with it in his head for a long time to come.

Kasteel heard a door shut.  He got the kitchen towel he’d been using, ran it under the tap again, got a half glass of water, and returned to the living room.  He washed Bryce’s face down until the little prick began to stir and groan.  Kasteel pulled out some bottles of meds, mixed several pills together, fed them to Bryce and then let him drink the water.  He waited until the painkillers kicked in, helped Bryce Clarke to his one good leg, and then drew the guy’s arm around his shoulder.

“Come on, Bryce.  I’ll take you to the hospital.  I’m headed there anyhow.”

He first heard of Abaddon a couple of weeks later from an old woman with a bad brain.

Her name was Merilee Himes, eighty-two years old, skin dark and wrinkled as a prune, with freckles like a spray of pepper shot burned across her cheeks.  She was remarkably healthy for her age.  Walked to church six miles from her home twice a week.  Occasionally walked to the VFW to play Bingo.  Had an active social life with many friends spread out across the city as well as a gentleman caller.  They picnicked in the park, went dancing, visited museums, and sojourned to four separate cemeteries to visit their deceased spouses.  They’d each buried two.

Maybe it was inevitable that some piss-poor driver would come along, on their cell or distracted with the kids or just fumbling around the satellite radio for the perfect song.

Turned out to be a seventeen-year-old girl with a fresh license, texting with her boyfriend.  She crossed over onto the shoulder while typing out 2 BLOX AWY, SEE U SOON and ran into Merilee Himes, launching her twenty feet into the air and knocking her into oncoming traffic.

The girl proceeded to text HLY FUK, MY DADS GONNA KLL ME!!!!! even as three more cars proceeded to run over Merilee.  All told she lost her left arm, both legs below the knee, her spleen, her right orbital socket, several large pieces of her skull, and about a quarter of her brain.

It was all right there in the police report stapled to the inside back jacket of the chart.

It was either a miracle or a very bad joke that Merilee Himes was still alive.  Kasteel went back and forth on which he thought it might be.

Merilee Himes had five children and sixteen grandchildren and forty-three great-great grandchildren.  They visited regularly in great big groups although only two visitors were allowed in the ICU patients’ rooms at any given time.  They left balloons, plants, cards, children’s paintings, candy, and plastic containers of food, all of which were strictly prohibited within the confines of ICU.  The nurses collected all the gifts and promised to keep these things safe for Merilee until she awoke.  Most of it was thrown away immediately, except for the candy, which was spread out among the staff.  The doctors and nurses would flirt, share a piece of chocolate, sometimes make out a little or just go fuck in a maintenance closet or a free room somewhere.

Kasteel ate the food brought by Merilee’s family when he could get his hands on it.  They had a leaning towards the southern spicy, lots of red peppers, mustard seeds, sausages, ribs, jambalaya, gumbo.  The nurses would bring it around to their station and leave it on the counter until the janitor came around to take the food, flowers, cards, and everything else away in their garbage pails.  Kasteel would get there first when the nurses weren’t around, collect the goods, and go share them with Hedgwick and others.

He’d ripped off a razor and shaving cream and had picked up clippers from brain surgery to trim his hair.  He’d been taking more vitamins, sunning himself out in the gardens, and hiking on the nature trails around the Castle.  He stole better fitting clothes and changed and showered more often.  He worked out in the cardio rehab wing, ran the treadmill, used the free weights, did the stairmaster.  He’d put on about ten pounds of muscle, getting back into shape.

Kasteel was washing up in Merilee’s room.  He had the night nurses’ schedules memorized.  They came around the floor every three hours for a quick peek and to check all the readings on the machines.  They did that up until two am, and then didn’t come around again until seven.  Merilee’s ICU room had a little futon on the other side of the room beneath the window.  He managed a couple of hours of sleep at a time and stared at the moon and thought of Kathy.

Just as dawn was beginning to break Merilee Himes said, “Abaddon.”

She hadn’t said a word in the three months since the accident.  According to her paperwork she had lost enough of her brain that while she wasn’t technically brain dead she had forever lost the power of speech.  She could dream and might one day wake up in a partially vegetative state, but her neurological functions were so impaired that she’d had no memory of her life, no recognition of family, and might only have the IQ of a three year old with no capacity for relearning.

He waited.  Maybe it was just a muscle spasm in her throat, a murmur that meant nothing.  He waited and she slowly turned her head in his direction and looked at him with her only eye.  With her only hand she motioned to him.  Kasteel leaped off the futon and went to her side.  She touched the side of his face and repeated the word.  “Abaddon.”

“What’s that, Merilee?  What are you saying?”

“Abaddon in shadow.”

The intensity in her remaining eye made him catch his breath.  He listened very closely. She reached out and clasped his hand in a powerful grip that made him wince.  Those who were dying but not yet dead often were stronger than hell.

“What’s Abaddon?” he asked.

“The angel of death,” she whispered.  Even though bandages covered her crushed skull and missing eye, he could feel it staring at him.  “The destroyer.  He’s going to kill me tonight.”

“No one’s going to kill you.  You survived the worst of it.  Your chart says you’ve stablized.”

“He’ll eat my chart and then he’ll eat me.”

“I won’t let him.”

“He told me.”

“When did he tell you, Merilee?”

“He comes to me in the night.”

“I’ve been here the last three nights.  No one else has been here.”

“Before that.  He came before that.”

Kasteel put his hand to the woman’s face.  He let her feel the strength and speed in his hand.  He let her feel his own scars, minor compared to hers, but still a lifetime of them.  “I’ll stay again tonight.  I’ll protect you.  No one will touch you.”

“He’ll eat you too. He’s already set the plague upon you.”

“Plague?”

“He marked you and murdered your firstborn.”

His hand tightened on hers.  He stared into the staring eye and said, “Why do you say that, Merilee?”  She didn’t respond, and soon the eye closed.  “How do you know that?  Tell me how you know that?”

But she was unresponsive again, back in the warmth of coma, where he couldn’t reach her.  But could Abaddon?

Kasteel hunted a deviant candy striper named Tracy who was really only volunteering so she could riffle through patients belongings, take camera phone pictures of sleeping men’s penises, torture babies, and satisfy her own sadism.  She’d stick pins, needles, and forks in comatose patients, take more photos, and post them to her site VEGETABLE STEW.  She’d bite newborns on their bare bottoms, wash the wounds with rubbing alcohol, and take photos before the bite mark faded.  She ran another site called TEACH THE LITTLE FUX PAIN.  She’d pull back the blankets of heavily sedated male patients, take photos, and then post them to TINY DIX & GIANT COX.  Sometimes she would fondle them, sometimes she would use vice grips on their testicles.

Looked like about ten of her friends were also playing the game, but none of them at the Castle.  A couple were candy stripers elsewhere, doing similar sport with babies and the unresponsive.  They had turned it up a notch and seemed to pick up men at truck stop diners.  They’d promise sex for cash, take their money, climb up into the cab, get the guy undressed, bite his johnson hard enough to make him bleed, take a photo, and run off.

Anybody could see that was going to end in tragedy soon.

He tumbled to the whole thing when he caught Tracy biting one of the babies.  He thought of hurting her then, doing something to her with his own teeth, but he couldn’t become that thing.  He owed it to his son.  He owed it to himself.  He owed it to the Castle.

He’d learned a fair amount about tranquilizers and sedatives in his time here.  He knew how to give a shot.  He’d given himself plenty.

Kasteel followed her for much of the day and caught Tracy alone just after evening visiting hours while she was fucking around with the catheter stuck in a doped up patient’s urethra.  The guy had prostate cancer and was receiving chemo and radiation treatments.  He’d just gone in for surgery and things hadn’t gone too well.  He was tranqued out and had a morphine drip giving him max doses.

Kasteel entered the room silently while Tracy was under the bed sheets yanking on the tubing and making the poor bastard’s johnson dance around like a marionette, taking pictures the whole time.  She had a handful of pins that she was going to send down the catheter and directly into his urethra.

Kasteel said, “You play a nasty game, Tracy.”

She glared at him, her expression shifting to terror, but only for a second.  She had a tight rein over herself, self-reliant, certain of her strength.  “And it interests you.”

“Only so far as I’m going to shut you and your friends down.”

“Who are you?”

“Someone who doesn’t like what you do around here.”

“I’m a volunteer.  I help out.”

“You’re a perv and a sadist.  Bad enough with the needles and the vice grips, but why the babies?”

She was maybe sixteen, blonde, next-door-girl lovely, and could play innocent like nobody’s business.  She gave him this confused look that was sexy, manipulative, and extremely crazy when you thought about it.  Here she was tugging the guy’s tubing, pins right there, camera phone in her hand, and she’s playing sincere vestal virgin.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do.  Why bite the babies?”

“I don’t bite babies.  I love babies.  I spend most of my shift on the pediatric ward.”

“I know you do.  Why bite the babies?”

“You need help.”

“You’re right.  Why bite the babies?”

Kasteel took a step closer just to look into her eyes in the dim lighting, the guy in the bed still snoring, the morphine drip depressing every few minutes.

“I hate them,” Tracy said.

“Why?”

“Why?  Why?  Why are you asking me why?” she asked.  “Why does anybody hate the things that they do?  Why do I hate them?   They’re weak.  They’re stupid.  They cry.  All they do is cry.”

“They smile and laugh sometimes too.”

“No, no never.”

“They tend to cry when somebody’s torturing them.”

“They never shut up!”

Her cell was humming and beeping with texts and calls.  Kasteel snatched it from her.

“Give me that!” she cried.

“No,” he said.

He appraised her.  He studied her.  She seethed with her brand of cruelty.  He was thankful he’d found her so early on in her cruel studies.  Another few nights, another week, and men would be ruptured and hemorrhaging to death all over the wing, and row after row of babies would be turning up with SIDS.

He met her eyes again and she whispered, “What are you going to do?”

“Stop you.  Punish you.”

It made her laugh.  It was the kind of laugh that could kill lonely men in cheap motels all over the world.  There was a power to it that would allow her to control boys, sway juries, persuade fate.  He closed his eyes and could see it all.  Even if she’d been caught, her teeth matching the bite marks, the dead children so clearly killed by her, she would never serve time, she would never go to prison, never come under a psychiatrist’s care.  She was too lovely for that.  As were all her friends.

He opened his eyes and stared at her.

She said, “You don’t want to hurt me.”

“No, I don’t.”

She took his hand, his powerful scarred hand, his hand that had not been held in weeks since his son had gotten too weak to grip even his finger.  Kasteel almost succumbed to the touch.  He weakened.  He let loose with a noise that was not the noise of a strong man.  She moved closer to him and tried to twist herself in his arms, her lips suddenly at his.

“You would never hurt me.”

“Take off your clothes,” he said.

“That’s more like it, tiger.”

“You abuse babies,” he said as she smiled carnally at him, still holding the tubing, still making the guy’s johnson dance around, presenting herself, the luscious face, the tight body, the perky breasts.  Kasteel grabbed her by the back of the hair and pulled gently, as if he was dipping her for a long, swooning kiss, and she draped herself in his arms, and popped the top off the syringe and gave her the needle in the neck.  She collapsed and her eyes rolled up, and he carried Tracy to the wheelchair he’d stashed in the rest room, and covered her with two blankets, and wheeled her down the corridor to another corridor to another, until they reached the elevators, and he took them down, down, down past the lobby, the parking garages, the sub-levels of the sub-levels, until they reached the morgue.  He texted all her friends.

NOW WE’RE IN THE PLACE OF THE DEAD.

It took him two hours to set everything up, but once the tableau was finished, it was goddamn disgusting.

It looked like a midnight mass from the blackest church ever built.  Ten thousand evil prayers had been said there amongst ten thousand burnt offerings.  He dumped her out naked onto one of the icy cold trays and pulled corpses from their vaults and laid naked men beside her with their teeth nipping and their dead tongues lapping.  It was a desecration but one that would be forgiven.  The dead would understand.

Kasteel threw up twice.  Not because this was the worst thing he’d ever done, because it wasn’t, not by a longshot mile.  But because the smell was everything he remembered about Eddie’s last days.  He hoped Eddie wasn’t watching him now.  He hoped that Kathy, alone in their home, wasn’t suddenly aware of him, the way we have vivid dreams about someone we no longer see or speak to and just can’t reach anymore.

He posed them all in an orgy of rotting flesh and pink beautiful youth.  They kissed her nipples, they put their blue hands on her intimate places, their penises sought access and entry.  When she came around she started to moan and cry.  He liked the sound of it, which said more about him than about her.  He took fifty photos and put them up across all her websites.  He took a lot of video.  He threw the blankets back on top of her.  He texted all the brutal awful evidence  to the other girls playing the game and wrote:

IT STOPS NOW OR YOU’LL GET WORSE THAN THIS.

He meant it.

The dead watched him.

They meant it too.

He got back to Merilee’s room to watch over her while she slept, the way he had promised.  And like she had promised him, she was dead.

The night nurses hadn’t even responded yet.  Merilee had flatlined less than sixty seconds before.  The machinery was redlining, whooping, and squealing.  Kasteel had to get out of here.  He slipped into the IC unit next door, where another geriatric was on a ventilator. He was awake and scared but couldn’t talk with the apparatus affixed to his throat.  He stared at Kasteel and held his frail hands up in a plea for mercy.

Nurses and a doctor rushed past.  Not so rushed, really, just a quick clip.  No one is going to try to save an eighty-two-year-old woman with only about half her head left.  They charged the defibrillator, said “clear,” hit her with the paddles, turned up the voltage, hit her again, and that was that.  One nurse stomped out of the room, frowning.  Kasteel was certain it was because she wasn’t going to get the good candy anymore.

Kasteel turned to the old guy in the bed, who was still lying there like he was going to be mugged.  Kasteel said, “Sorry about this, I didn’t mean to cause you any upset.”

The guy glanced at the nurse’s button but thought better than to push it.  Kasteel checked the old man’s chart.

He was Chester Milgrom, sixty-two, professor of economics at a local second-rate state university, assorted health problems related to heart disease and diabetes.  He’d been in a motel room fornicating with a male graduate student when he suffered a heart attack.  The graduate student called 911 and when the university caught wind of what was going on, they immediately allowed Chester to resign before the media whirlwind start.  Chester told them to go to hell.  He needed his insurance now, he wasn’t about to quit.  The graduate student was twenty-eight-years old, not a kid.  He went on record stating that he was a consenting adult and happened to love and admire Chester dearly.  It was bad form to ever diddle one of your students, but who was going to be hurt by a media blitz?  An openly gay sixty-two-year-old man or a failing state college?

“Good for you, Chester,” Kasteel said.  “You were a dope for picking your boyfriends from your student roster, but at least you didn’t roll over for the board.”

Chester’s expression shifted just a little.  Showed a little embarrassment, a little pride, a little love.

“Has he visited you?”

Chester nodded.

“Good.  So it was real.  A significant relationship.”

Chester nodded.

“You’re lucky.”

Chester nodded.

“You ever hear of somebody called Abaddon?  Somebody who wanders around the Castle?”

The old man, eyes wide with puzzlement, shook his head slowly.

“You see anybody visiting Merilee’s unit next door who weren’t doctors or her family?”

The old man pointed to Kasteel.

“You saw me prowling around.  Anybody else?  Night before last?”

The old man shook his head.

“I’m going to be back from time to time, just to check on you.”

Chester made a motion like he wanted to write something.  Kasteel found a pen affixed to the chart.  He took out one of the pages, turned it over, and handed the jacket to the old guy.

Chester wrote: PLEASE DON’T COME BACK.

“I’m not going to mug you, Chester.”

PARDON ME FOR WRITING THIS, BUT YOU LOOK LIKE BAD NEWS.

“I am, you’re right.  But really, you think you’re going to get any worse news from me than you’ve already gotten from your surgeons?”

YOU HAVE A POINT.

“Merilee was talking about someone threatening her.  She knew she was going to die.”

SHE WAS SEVERELY BRAIN DAMAGED.

“I know, but it still makes me wonder.”

ARE YOU A PSYCHIATRIC PATIENT?

“No, I’m not,” Kasteel admitted, and the acknowledgment felt like a lie.  He paused.  “But I probably should be.”  That’s all he wanted to say, but listened to the sound of his own voice continuing, still talking, and he was angry with himself that the truth was seeping out.  He knew it had something to do with the fact that Chester couldn’t speak, wouldn’t ask any shrink questions.  “My son died a few weeks ago.  I’m out of my head with grief.  You know why I can tell you I’m out of my head with grief without breaking down and sobbing?”

BECAUSE YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR HEAD WITH GRIEF.

“See, Chester,” Kasteel said, letting out a grin.  “I knew you’d understand.  Keep an eye open.  You got a cell phone?”

The old man nodded.

“Here’s my number.  You call if you get worried about anything or if you see anything weird.  Weirder than a guy like me wandering into your room.  Text me or just hit 1-1-1.  I’ll know it’s you and I’ll come immediately.”

The next morning Kasteel found Hedgwick in radiology, waiting for a chance to sneak behind the X-Ray machine and dose himself.  Hedge had a thing about X-Rays.  He thought if he studied pictures of the inside of his head long enough maybe he’d figure out what was wrong with him.  Some nugget or walnut clearly shown in his brain, so that he could use a spork and just scoop it out and his father’s ghost would be gone, and Hedge could get back to living a life on the outside without any spoiled ham sandwiches.

“You’re going to give yourself cancer,” Kasteel told him.

“I already have cancer.  Cancer of the soul.  Cancer of my life.”

They sat side by side in the small waiting area outside radiology, where patients were stacked up with various tumors and growths and blooming mold inside of them.  The joke was that the doctors didn’t give a damn about X-Rays anymore.  If they saw something or didn’t see something they always said that to get a really good luck inside of you they needed to send you down for an MRI.  After that it was the CT Scan. You had to go to each one, in order, least expensive to most, no matter what was growing inside of you.

“You know what my father says is the worst part of being dead?”

“Please don’t tell me it has anything to do with ham sandwiches.”

“No, no of course not.  Dad says it’s the fact that he knows all the answers to all his questions now, the things that haunted him his entire life, the yearning, the craving, the curiosity.  All of that has been sated.  And he’s thankful for that.  He’s only sorry that he wasted so much time worrying about all those things.  He wishes he knew then what he knows now.”

“And he knows everything now.”

“Basically.”

Kasteel tried to imagine if that would be heaven or hell.  To get all the answers to all your questions, to know all the things that went wrong, why and where you and the rest of the world went off track, and to finally understand your own humanity, make sense of your own life, only after you were dead.

They continued to sit there, watching the young and the old, the ones who looked healthy and those clearly dying, the cancer kids and the punks who’d busted their arms in the skate parks, coming and going endlessly.  No one paid any attention to Kasteel or Hedge.

“What do you know about someone in the Castle called Abaddon?” Kasteel asked.

Hedgwick was staring at a bald girl of about seven.  The kid beaming, the kid radioactive.  As she passed, Hedgwick reached out and ran his palm over the tiny knots on her crown.  She flinched and turned to glare at him while her mother, also glowering, opened her mouth to say something.

Then she caught a look of Kasteel there, staring calmly at her, his eyes full of pity, commiseration, and condolences for all she was going to have to endure when the kid was dead, and the woman visibly shivered.  She grabbed her daughter’s hand and tugged her out of the room.

“You’ve been talking to someone with a bad brain,” Hedge said.

“How do you know that?”

“Only people with bad brains talk about Abaddon.”

“Don’t you have a bad brain?”

“I’ve got schizophrenia with a tendency toward psychotic breaks, but I wouldn’t necessarily call my brain bad.”

Kasteel didn’t have a response to that.  He waited.  He let Hedgwick think it over.  Hedgwick clearly knew something.  Maybe it would help.

“Abaddon always wins the death matches on the wards.”

“He a patient?”

“He is and he isn’t.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, he’s like you.”

Someone who shouldn’t be here, but who couldn’t leave.  The hospital wouldn’t let him go either.  He was another child of the Castle.

“What’s he look like?”

“We don’t know.”

“Why not?”

“We can’t remember.  None of us on the wards can remember.”

“Explain that.”

“We can’t remember what Abaddon looks like.  The same way you can’t remember your name.”

“I could remember it, if I wanted to.”

“But you don’t want to.  And we don’t want to remember what Abaddon looks like.  What he does, who he kills.”

“Who does he kill?”

“I just told you I can’t remember.”

“What do you remember?”

Hedge remembered a lot.

“I know that it’s a Hebrew word meaning ‘destruction’ as in a place of destruction and ruin.  In the Book of Revelation an angel called Abaddon is shown as king of an army of locusts, translated as ‘which in Greek means the Destroyer.’  There’s an additional note in the Latin Vulgate not present in the Greek text.  ‘In Latin Exterminans,’ with ‘exterminans’ being the Latin for ‘destroyer.’"

“You remember all that.”

“I remember weird things.”

“Hedge, why would you know all that about Abaddon?”

“I don’t know.  The Christian scriptures contain the first known depiction of Abaddon as an individual instead of a place. In Revelation 9:11: And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.”

“Apollyon.”

“In Revelation 9:7‑11. Abaddon is described as ‘the angel of the abyss, and king of a plague of locusts that resemble horses with crowned human faces, women's hair, lions' teeth, wings, and the tail of a scorpion.’”

Kasteel laid his head back and pictured that.  He tried to see the thing eating Merilee Himes’ chart, and then later on, devouring her.

“I can see why you wouldn’t want to remember that.”

“Now you have to forget all of this too.  Forget Abaddon like you’ve forgotten yourself.”

“I don’t think I can,” Kasteel said.

“Of course you can,” Hedge said.  “You have a bad brain too.”

Kasteel stood at the top of the Fool’s Tower, blinded by the glare of the setting sun, and phoned Kathy.

She answered without any kind of a greeting.  No hello, no nothing, just the silent waiting.  He wondered if it was because she knew it was him or if, like him, she’d begun to lose all the usual social conventions in the wake of Eddie’s death.

“It’s me,” Kasteel said.

Still, the silence.

She’d always been stronger than him.  Whenever he had floundered on a job or afterwards, while the take was being split and his own men sometimes got edgy and planned to double-cross him, she’d whisper in his ear the heart and truth of the matter.  “He’s going to betray you.  Watch.”  And he’d have his eyes on the guy when the rip-off was about to go down, the prick about to shoot up the place with a ludicrous, long-barreled .357, and Kasteel would already have his gun in the other guy’s face and say, “No. No. Wrong time, wrong score.  Rip off your next partner instead, all right?”

She was intuitive, smart, sharp-eyed, and she’d kept him from killing at least a half-dozen guys over the years, just because she knew when something was going to go down, and him always greedy, thinking about the money, counting the money, excited, heated, instead of keeping cool and keeping watch.  Him always in the life and always wanting out of the life, so they could move to the suburbs, start a family.

He wondered what kind of shit the shrink was telling her.

The sun dipped beneath the vanishing point, sparking gold and crimson for a last second before dipping away into darkness.  With the night came a cold breeze that worked its way across his throat and down his chest and into him.

“Kath?”

“Why are you still there?” she asked.  “Better yet, why are you calling?  If you don’t want to come home then why are you reaching out?”

“To–”

“To hear my voice?  Because you want me to tell you about Eddie’s funeral?  What I chose to bury him in.  Who attended?  What the weather was like?  No, you don’t want to hear about that.  You didn’t want to show up.  You left me alone.”  No anger at all, no rage, no chance of tears, still cool, still sharp.  “You’re still leaving me all alone.  I had to make all the arrangements.  I have to deal with circumstances.  I have to figure things out by myself.  I had to stab a guy in the arm the other night.  You want to know why?  Because he got it into his head that you’ve been playing low because you pulled a major score.  He wanted to grab a piece for himself.  So I stabbed his ass.  Let him tell his crew about that instead.”

He stepped to the edge of the tower, looking down at the gardens where others had suicided, where the ashes of at least a few hundred cholera victims had to be buried.  He wondered if he was just waiting for Abaddon or somebody like Abaddon to sneak up behind him and give him a push.

“Stop it,” she said.  “I know what you’re doing.  Just stop it.  You don’t want to die.  You don’t want to kill yourself.  You don’t even want to be there, even though you might think you do.  You want to come home.  You want to come back to me.  But you can’t, and you don’t know why.  But I still have some hope you’ll be able to figure it out.  And when you do you’ll come back.  Until then, don’t bother calling.  Don’t ask how I’m doing, I’ll make out just fine, you know that.  Get better.  Get strong.  Watch your back.  Protect yourself.  Fight.”

“Yes,” he said, and hung up.

While stealing food from the cafeteria Kasteel ran into a contingent of homeless who were living in the stairwells and pilfering what they could from the trash.  He helped where he could.  He’d cue distractions and sneak meals out to them.  It usually went off like clockwork.  But there were several children among them who needed regular meals.

Kasteel slipped into the cafeteria to find that one of the mothers had tried to sneak some milk from the big refrigerators at the back of the kitchen.  You had to be really fast to steal from those fridges without being seen.  She hadn’t made it.  One of the cooks went batshit and started chasing the woman around with a spatula.  A couple of helpful doctors thought to detain the lady and tried to corral her.

Two pulmonary specialists making five mill a year and a fat cook tipping the scales at maybe three-fifty, six-one, squaring off on a twenty-five-year-old young woman with a toddler in her arms, a couple of small boxes of milk in each hand.  She wore worn, thin, stained clothes.  The kid was a girl wearing a boy’s blue jumper.  The kid squealed, laughing, as her mother turned and turned again, stepping away, until she was backed into a corner.  The rest of the kitchen staff ignored everybody.  They were used to this sort of action, the homeless begging, and snatching fruit and sandwiches off the food line.

The girl giggled some more.  The woman glanced left and right, stuck in the corner, finally noticing Kasteel there, knowing he was different, and staring at him plaintively.  Kasteel stepped in between the two doctors.  As he passed them he tapped each of them on the back of the hand with his forefinger.  He smiled at the woman, turned and stood in front of her.  He told the doctors, “If you don’t back off?  First thing I do is?  I’m going to break your thumbs.”

The doctors backed away.  It wasn’t their fight in the first place.  Pulmonary specialists getting involved with some poor lady shoplifting.  The fuck business was it of theirs.

The cook put down the spatula and picked up a meat cleaver.  Humongous guy, protecting the milk as if he’d been charged this duty by God.  He’d sworn solemn oaths before a dozen cardinals, bowed down on his tubby knee, blessed by the Pope, don’t let anyone take the milk.

The woman said, “Wait, I’ll put them back.  Please, I’m sorry.”

“Dirty hippies are always desperate,” the cook said, facing off against Kasteel, the cleaver swaying.  “Get a job then.”  He flipped the cleaver and caught it by the handle.  One of those guys who practiced maneuvers in the kitchen like he was twirling guns, getting ready for a duel.  He’d been waiting for a chance to cut somebody, to chop somebody up, to move up from steak and veal and pork ribs.  Killer for morality, murderer for God, vicious for middle class America. Everybody just wanted the self-righteous excuse to maul somebody else, to threaten, to scare somebody else the way they’d been scared their entire lives.

“Please, there’s no need for this,” the woman said.

“I think there is,” the cook responded, glowering, waiting, stepping closer.  He kept watching Kasteel, thinking him another homeless wreck, which he was in his way, but not their way.

The woman trembling, the baby smiling, the milk being milk and much more than milk, precious as gold in some circumstances.  The rest of her clan hiding in the deep corners and dark pockets of the Castle, running, dying, damned.  How ironic was it that a kid could be ill from lack of milk in the largest hospital ever built?  The Castle had once had its own dairy.

The cook angled the cleaver towards Kasteel and said, “I don’t like the look of you.”

“You shouldn’t.  And you shouldn’t try to take on women and babies all alone, fatso.  You should call security.  Get them down here too.”

“I already did.”

“Good.  They sending Conrad and Watkins?”

“You crazy, smelly bastard.”

“I’ve been using the industrial grade cleansers in the shower, fatty. No stink on me.”

That doughy face squeezed into a caricature of real fury.  “I don’t like the way you talk to me.”

“I don’t blame you.  I’m talking mean to you.  Put down the cleaver and go make yourself a stuffed chicken.  If you see anybody pilfering some milk or juice or salads or maybe a turkey sandwich, look the other way.  There’s no skin off your fat ass.  Show some generosity.  Show some kindness.  Show a little mercy.  Look, I’ll show you how.”

Kasteel moved.  He jumped the cook, who didn’t know how to fight or defend himself at all, and gave him three quick, mean hooks in his tubby belly.  Kasteel wanted to do more, wanted to hurt the prick more, but he was good to his promise and showed mercy.  The guy’s face went purple, then white.  He clutched the cleaver more tightly to him, fell over backwards, and rolled to a stop against one of the counters. The rest of the kitchen staff finally perked up and took notice.

Kasteel said, “Go back to your work, you lot.  And put less vinegar in the tuna.”

The kid went squeeee and the lady moaned.  After a moment she said, “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

“It’s all right,” he told her. “You didn’t do anything wrong.  People are in need.  The Castle can provide.”

“No no, now security will come looking for us.  They...they use their billy clubs, they’re so cruel...”

“They’re not going to find you.  Go on, head out the exit there and go back to your group.  Do any of you have a cell phone?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t matter.  Use one of the hospital phones.  There’s hundreds of them all over.” He said his number aloud and made her repeat it back to him until she had it memorized. “Call if you need any help, for anything.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything.  What’s your name?”

“Mary.”

“And your little girl?”

“Edie.”

Of course it would be Edie.  Of course it would be something close to Eddie, so that the grief would hit him again under the heart and make him that much more certain of why he was here, of what he was doing here.  Of course the girl would giggle and reach for him, and he would tickle her under the chin and listen to her guffaw.  Of course he would escort them to the exit and Mary would kiss him, trying for his cheek as he turned, her moist lips coming together with kindness and no passion on his throat, under the ear, in the same place where, when Kathy kissed him, threw fuel on his fire.

The fat cook was still down.  The kitchen staff had backed off, way off to the other side of the kitchen, some of them watching him, some of them cooking, some of them smoking where they clearly couldn’t smoke.  Everyone broke the rules.  The Pope was just gonna have to tell God about the missing milk, send divine signals up his big Pope hat, “Jesu, sweet Jesu, some milk got away today.”  The cook would have to tithe twice as much this month, stick a chicken leg into the collection plate.

Kasteel backed away, headed down the nearest hall, could feel gravitational and tidal forces carrying him closer and closer, as he sped up his step and turned a corner and there stood Conrad and Watkins with their truncheons already in their hands.

They squeezed a little more drama out of the scene, waiting to beat on some people who had already been beaten down as low as they could go, with no money, no house, no future.  All they had to offer now was blood, and they’d willingly trade it for the health of their children.

Watkins said, “Hey, look, it’s the happy asshole.  And he’s still happy.”

“And he’s still an asshole,” Conrad said.  “And he’s still here. Despite our escorting him out.”

Kasteel smiled and said, “Yes, I’m still here.”

They were a good team.  They knew how to work together.  They came at him from two sides, staying clear of each other.  Kasteel stood his ground, calm, patient, with only a little anger flowing through him, his heart still full of mercy.  The two bitter, icy-eyed guards swung at him in short, tight arcs, going for the sweet spots, the stomach and the ribs.  Kasteel dodged and slipped fluidly left and right, almost dancing between them, his fast strong hands fast and strong again, the vitamins rushing through him, the sunlight having ignited health, his now tan skin hiding some of the worst scars so that as they moved down the hall fighting, he saw himself in the reflections of room windows, the shining chrome runners.  He saw who he was and who he’d been.  He saw himself being beaten by these two men, and saw his blood dripping in his beard, and saw how he’d been without purpose, without any provided definition, with nothing to make him feel self-righteous.  He was the same now and he was very different.

They eased down toward the labs where they ran the bloodwork.  Doors open, docs drawing test tubes full of blood, checking cholesterol, triglycerides, glycemic indexes.  Obese men worried about their hearts, staring down at their own blood and knowing it would kill them, nobody looking up as Kasteel parried Watkins’s truncheon, turned and clipped Conrad on the chin, a short nice nasty chopping blow.  It made Conrad’s eyes tear up, and the tears made him sneeze.

While his body locked Kasteel snatched his billy club and rapped him hard in the back of each thigh.  Conrad cried out and hit the floor like he was dying.  Watkins was swinging wildly now, trying to catch Kasteel in the temple.  Kasteel parried the truncheon easily, jabbed out and hit Watkins twice in the chest.

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 across 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.

He took the elevator up and moved through the corridors.  He took his phone out.  It seemed very important that he take the phone out of his pocket.  He didn’t know why.  He stared at it wondering if he was supposed to call Kathy.  Except Kathy didn’t want to hear from him, not until he was done here, and he wasn’t done here.

Kasteel looked at his phone and began to walk faster through the halls.  He had no idea where he was going.  He glanced at faces left and right.  Perhaps one of them would understand.  He got to the lobby and watched the police pull up and rush inside and down the corridors.  Sweat slithered across his brow.  He felt forces gathering around him, colliding, withdrawing, weighing on him, leaving him.  He didn’t understand what any of it meant.  He started to move.  He started to run.  He sprinted through the halls.

The phone rang in his hand.

1

The Castle showed mercy and swept him along towards ICU.  He picked up speed until he couldn’t even see where he was anymore.  Faces blurred, the walls were no longer brick and mortar.  Kasteel passed into and through them, or so it felt.  Many of the faces that had been in the operating theater watching him were around him once again.  They populated the hospital, they would never know his name but they were a part of him.

Kasteel shouted, “Chester!”

Chester Milgrom, sixty-two, professor of economics at a local second-rate state university, assorted health problems related to heart disease and diabetes, sitting up in bed with his twenty-eight year old lover, the graduate student who hadn’t abandoned him in the midst of the media frenzy, kissing gently.  Chester stared at Kasteel and shrugged, gestured, What’s the matter?

The grad student said, “Who are you?”

Kasteel looked around the room, asked, “Chester, where’s your phone?”

Chester held it up.

“Did you call me?”

Chester shook his head.

“By accident?  Did you dial my number?”

Chester checked the phone, shook his head.

Kasteel looked at his cell again.  He didn’t recognize the number.

IS EVERYTHING ALL RIGHT?

“Sure.  Somebody overheard me talking to you and telling you to dial 1-1-1.”

Abaddon?

“Probably.”

OH CHRIST.

“Don’t worry about it.  This is all coming to an end. Can’t you feel it?”

WHAT’S COMING TO AN END?

“Forget it, Chester.”  Kasteel looked at the boyfriend and said, “You in for the long haul?”

The boyfriend said, “Yes.”

“Good, glad to hear it.  What’s the prognosis?  How much longer will he be in here?”

“They’re still not sure.  They found other problems when they opened up his chest.”

“At least he doesn’t have a bad brain.”

“Excuse me?”

Kasteel just grinned.  He stepped out of the IC unit.  The Castle whispered to him. He strolled.  He had never strolled in his life before, but now he strolled.  He closed his eyes to focus.  He steeled his will.

He imagined Abaddon eating charts, choosing his victims well, finding the woman with the bad brain and talking to her all night long.  He pictured Abaddon the destroyer in wait before the glass windows of pediatrics, laying claim to the newborns like Tracy had, hoping to bite them.  Abaddon and friends shaking pins into pee holes.  Abaddon putting up websites.  Abaddon on the top floor while Kasteel was at the bottom in the morgue.  Abaddon waiting at the bottom while Kasteel stood at the top, wandering around the roof.  Abaddon the enemy from out of the ancient biblical lands.  Abaddon the brother, another child of the Castle.  Abaddon always listening, hidden, like Kasteel, watching, moving through walls, sitting in the stadium seats of Kasteel’s dreams.

He walked with his eyes shut, the tides of the hospital drawing him forward, left, right, into the elevator, his fingers knowing which button to push, or more likely the buttons understanding which one should brush against his fingertips.

Finally, he opened his eyes in the dimly lit recesses of the ancient hospital brickwork and saw the wires hanging down from the ceiling tiles.  They’d been like that for month after month.  They’d been like that forever and would remain like that forever.  He moved to the exit and stepped out and headed toward the Fool’s Tower.

He looked up and at the other end of the walkway he saw a living shadow.  He stared and the shadow stared back at him.  The two of them calm and in repose, understanding that this night would be the last night, without knowledge or interest in what would be ending, what would now finally begin.  He took a step and the shadow retreated a step into the tower.  Kasteel, who only smiled when he was in pain, smiled now, for the anguish he knew was about to come.

He whispered, “Abaddon,” and began to chase the angel of death, the destroyer of firstborns.

Abaddon wasn’t even in a rush, hardly moved fast at all, certainly didn’t run, not the way Kasteel was running, trying to catch up.  Abaddon turned and Kasteel had a moment of recognition that faded almost instantly.

“Look who it is,” Abaddon whispered.  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The creature Abaddon, with one bad leg, gimping along but traversing the tower the way that few others could, as if the walls gave way.  Abaddon sneering bitterly, quietly, slowly laughing, in tune with his pain.  Boffo the unfunny clown, carrying a cane with his top hat, without a big pair of shoes.  Still with short guy syndrome, Bryce Clarke needing to impress himself upon the world, upon this new world he found himself in, this new city of invisibility and power.

“You could’ve just called me on your own phone, Bryce.”

“That would have been too easy.”

“What did you do to Merilee Himes?”

“I talked to her.  I looked at her.  I told her to die and she did.  I ate her.  The same way I ate the others.”

“Which others?”

“The same way I’ll eat you.”

Kasteel tried to suppress a surge of guilt.  He had pushed Bryce too hard.  Bryce had been more than an abusive husband and father, he’d been a complete lunatic on the edge of losing his mind.  Kasteel should’ve recognized it, should’ve noticed the signs.  He’d handled the situation all wrong.  A man who needed to always prove himself the toughest and sharpest and meanest little prick in the room, and Kasteel had beaten, scarred, and crippled him right in his own living room, in front of the wife and son he resented so much.  No wonder he talked of plague and murdering of firstborn sons.

Kasteel followed Bryce up the staircase, stone step by stone step.

“It’s time for you to be quiet, Bryce.”

“You already tried to destroy my voice.  You can’t.  You aren’t able.  You don’t have the capacity.  I kill at will.  I kill on the wards.  I steal homeless children.  I eat them.”

“You should’ve just started by apologizing to your wife and son.”

“I have no wife and son.”

“Neither do I, except when I do.  One’s waiting for me at home.  The other is waiting for me beyond the veil.”

“That’s where I wait for you too.”

Step by step, retreating up the stone stairwell, past the windows showing the silver moonlight and stars grappling to fit within human view.  Story by story, where the ghosts of the fever victims, the civil war surgeries, the Vietnam vets, all appeared and pushed them up, up, up to where men without names like Kasteel and Boffo suicided off the thin rim.

When they reached the top of the Fool’s tower they stared at each, destroyer bearing witness to destroyer, children of the Castle squaring off.

“Do you think you’ll ever get better, Bryce?  Are you trying?  Do you think you want to get back to your wife and son?  Or should I put you down?”

“Children laugh at me.”

“It’s a gift.”

“Children die at my touch.”

“Not quite.”

Bryce Clarke, Boffo the clown, Abaddon the angel, swung his cane and caught Kasteel across the shoulder.  It hurt like hell.  Kasteel went down to one knee.  He thought he should give that one to Bryce.  He’d crippled Bryce.  Boffo had to lash back.  Boffo had to get a few licks in.  Abaddon was known to men with bad brains.  Kasteel saw Bryce’s arms rise in the night like black blood-soaked wings.  Bryce lashed out with the cane again.  It brushed against Kasteel’s skull.  Blood spurted.  Abaddon sniffed and said, “Ahhhh.”

It was all right.  Everything was all right.  Sometimes you let the other guy think he had you down and a hole opened in his defenses.  Like now.  Bryce doing the little dance around the roof of the Fool’s tower.  Kasteel could roll to his feet and shove the poor little prick eleven stories down if he wanted.  But it wasn’t going to end that way.  He hadn’t come this far just to wind up nudging a man who was already an inch off the ledge.

Maybe there was a chance to save him.  Maybe you just had to leave the guy in the waiting room a few more days and something would snap into place.  A little therapy, a little indulgence.  Kasteel really didn’t know.  Maybe he was going to have to kill the bastard.

Kasteel turned back to the Castle and asked, “What do I have to do?”

Bryce swung the cane again.  Kasteel dodged and Bryce twirled around twice completely, heading off the edge.  Kasteel reached out and grabbed the cane and Bryce held on, his ruined leg failing to hold up his weight.  Blood ran into Kasteel’s face as they remained frozen like that, the breeze rising, Bryce with one foot off in space, the other trembling, no big shoes, Kasteel holding him up, keeping him alive.

“Let me go.”

”No.”

“I’m nothing but a fool.  You’ve already destroyed the destroyer.”

“I just gave you more room to move in.  In the Castle you could cut loose.  They should’ve locked you up in ward eight.”

“They tried.  I slew my opponents.  I earned my freedom.”

Kasteel was going to have to find out what really happened down there on ward eight.

He gave a hard tug on the cane and Bryce came flying into Kasteel’s arms.  Kasteel clipped him on the chin.  That’s all it took.  The angel of death closed his eyes and fell asleep there in the dark wind, in the shimmering mercurial starlight.

Kasteel called Beth Clarke.

He said, “I made a mistake.”

“What mistake?”

“I should’ve found a better way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I should’ve either killed him or helped him.  I shouldn’t have crippled him.  He was already crippled.  I just made him worse.  I made him Boffo.”

“Boffo?  Are you talking about that crappy clown?”

“The crappy clown was Bryce.”

“No.  That’s not possible.  I would’ve recognized him.”

“He’s unrecognizable.  I did that.”

“You’re not to blame.  You saved my life and the life of my son.  I’m certain of it.  But–but how is he walking?  He wasn’t supposed to be able to get out of bed for three months at least.”

“He’s insane.  Insane people can do amazing things.  They can smell a dead young woman burning in the wind.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to kill him.”

“Do what you have to do,” Beth Clarke said.  “Kill him if you have to.”

Kasteel was about to disconnect when another voice came over the phone.  It was the boy, John, whose voice Kasteel had never heard before.  The boy said, “I hate him.  I don’t know if I can ever forgive him.  But...don’t kill my father.”

“All right,” Kasteel said.

He carried Bryce down, step by step, stone by stone, and held him in his arms like a child, like a maimed firstborn son.  He hugged the lunatic to him the way he had hugged Eddie to him.  Kasteel began to cry for his sins, and a few minutes later Abaddon’s body also began to tremble in his arms, also crying.  The two children of the Castle sobbed for each other and themselves, and for the others that had come before them and those that would follow.  Kasteel said, “Your son wants you to live.  Get sane, Bryce.  For his sake.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Try.”

He called Kathy.

“Are you ready to come home?” she asked.

“Yes.”

He hung up.  He walked out the front door.  He could’ve waited for her to come pick him up, but to hell with it.  He found the nearest car with MD tags.  He didn’t even need to pop the door.  It was already open.  As if the Castle was inviting him to leave once and for all, like an unwelcome guest, hoping he’d never come back.  Kasteel went to break the steering column but the keys were in the ignition.

Hedgwick was in the backseat.

“You don’t mind if I come along, do you?”

“Did you see all of that?”

“All of what?”

“No ham sandwiches, Hedge.”

Hedgwick reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out three or four wrapped sandwiches and dumped them out the window.

“No stealing my trash can lids,” Kasteel said.  “No running around your dad’s building.  No scaring my wife.”

“I promise.  Do you remember your name yet?”

“No.”

“It’ll come back to you.”

“Yes,” Kasteel said, throwing the car into reverse, pulling out, throwing it into drive, and gunning along.  Before he went home he had to stop off somewhere first.  “I think it will.”

He didn’t know where his son was buried, but he knew he would find the way.

Tom Piccirilli is an American novelist and short story writer. He has sold over 150 stories in the mystery, thriller, horror, erotica, and science fiction fields. Piccirilli is a two-time winner of the International Thriller Writers Award for "Best Paperback Original" (2008, 2010). He is a four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. He was also a finalist for the 2009 Edgar Allan Poe Award given by the Mystery Writers of America, a final nominee for the Fantasy Award, and he won the first Bram Stoker Award given in the category of "Best Poetry Collection".

Santiago Caruso was born in 1982, in Quilmes, Argentina.  He is a symbolist and surreal artist, with an avant-garde concept but rooted in the nineteenth century´s  decadentism. Dedicated to the fantastique,  metaphysical horror and poetry, he had illustrated books for Libros del Zorro Rojo, Dark Regions Press, Ex Occidente Press, Tordesilhas, Tartarus Press, Random House Mondadori, Planeta and Penguin.

His work stands out both for the vigor of its poetry as well as for its technique. Member of the Beinart Surreal Art Collective since 2010, the artwork of Caruso is well represented in galleries and museums of Buenos Aires, United States, United Kingdom, Mexico and Spain

Kickstarter for Black Labyrinth Book II: Joe R. Lansdale begins Tuesday, October 8th on Kickstarter.com

Join us on 10/08/2013 in the Publishing -> Fiction category on Kickstarter.com to help bring a new psychological horror novella from one of the living masters of dark fiction: Joe R. Lansdale, author of Edge of Dark Water, Bubba Ho-Tep, the Hap and Leonard series, Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (later developed into the premiere episode of Masters of Horror directed by Don Coscarelli on Showtime) the Drive-In and many other short stories, novellas, novels and comic books.

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