Project Cain (25 page)

Castillo was upstairs staring at the Sizemore house as usual. Still waiting. And I was a couple of rooms away, stretched out in a small upstairs loft that overlooked the dark family room below. Castillo said he wouldn’t need me again until morning. I hoped to sleep again. Couldn’t. The paperback was open and across my face. (I’d already read the whole thing twice.) I breathed in the scent of its pages. Tried to clear my mind of all its concerns and questions and
doubts. Every fifteen minutes or so a car’d go by and its headlights would briefly sneak around the book and my closed eyes.

Eventually, hours later, maybe, I gave up.

He took shape then.

I opened my eyes, and between the railing posts the boy’s face emerged in the darkness beneath me. The shadows playing off and up the family room walls and corners, the shallow ruts and lines in the carpet; streaks of black where furniture had once been. Muted light from a neighbor’s porch light bleeding through the back windowpanes, casting curious streaks and shapes across the whole room. All trickling slowly together in the blackness and combining into more-distinguishable things. A mouth. Eyes. Jawline. An ear. A smile.

Soon a complete face. An Asian kid.

Sometimes I can force myself to look away. Like in the motel shower. But not this time.

It was as if I’d been caught in a magical trance, or I was a deer in headlights. Once the face started to take shape, I felt I had to let it finish. I was unable to look away, and he now filled the whole room below.

•  •  •

Later I would learn that Konerak’d been only fourteen when killed by Dahmer. That he and his family had come to Milwaukee from Laos to escape the Communists. That, after Konerak’s death, his family had removed all of his pictures from his house because they could not bear the pain of seeing his face.

•  •  •

Those same giant black eyes gazed up at me now as I struggled to break away.

The lines of the mouth bending, opening as if to speak. To scream.
I closed my own eyes, unwilling to look, to maybe eventually hear. When I opened them again, the face had already all but faded.

An illusion. Imagination. No more . . . Yet another shape had already taken his place.

A darkness moving into the room below from the unseen kitchen. A terrible blackness spreading steadily across the carpet, consuming whatever faint memory was left of the boy’s face.

The Woman in the Black Dress. The Thing on the Bed.

Standing perfectly still just within the opening of the kitchen, just out of sight. A glimpse only. (Thank God.) The boy’s face continued to dissolve away from her widening reach. Her shadow consuming the whole room as it had the park, working up the wall toward me. The neighbor’s porch light muted, vanishing also. Her despair filling the whole world.

I looked up from the spreading blackness to where her face should be. Again, only a glimpse. Horrendous white. So artificially bright, it looked wrong. Sick. Perverted. And an enormous unblinking eye. I could only see the one. Gaping straight back at me.

Then long black fingers trailing up her mask. Monstrously elongated. Deformed. Fingers a foot long. Tapered at the ends in sharp nails like needles. Peeling the mask back.

I thought that I would scream bloody murder or that my chest would explode from my beating heart, but it was calm. I was lost. Peaceful. As if time were standing completely still. Waiting to see the monster within.

The taloned fingers skinned back the white mask. The enormous unblinking doll eye lifting to the ceiling. Beneath the mask, the glimpse of the real face beneath.

My father’s face.

Spattered in blood.

I rolled over, away from all the monsters below. Shivering. Queasy.

Lost. Gone.

•  •  •

I pulled myself together later. Hours later, I’d say.

And then went to Castillo. What I would say to him exactly, I had no clue.

He didn’t want to hear about the things I’d seen any more than I did. They couldn’t help him in any way. And they would only make me more of a monster in his eyes.

Yet . . .

I still stood in the doorway to the bedroom, half in the hall. Afraid to commit to the conversation I really, really wanted to have. I ended up trying pointless small talk. He told me to go read my book. I figured I’d get more specific, try to get us to where I needed to be, and asked about Ox. Castillo started to blow me off again but I just kept pushing. I had to. I wasn’t going back out into that dark house again until I’d found out more.

I asked where he and Ox had met, and he admitted in Afghanistan ten years before.

Then I finally asked about the ghosts. About talking to ghosts.

•  •  •

“Talking to ghosts” was the last thing Castillo and Ox had talked about at the baseball game. I hadn’t forgotten that little exchange. Far from it. Both of them kinda joking about it but, at the same time, seeming to me they were, just beneath the surface and all, both dead serious about whatever this thing was. Something they did with ghosts, something this mysterious Kristin woman had taught them about. And since “ghost” meant a hundred different things to everyone,
I was real curious here. You can’t deny I was a bit of a ghost expert myself.

•  •  •

At first Castillo acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. But I stepped fully into the room now, kept pushing. Castillo searched the ceiling for an answer. He finally admitted it was “something” that “someone” taught “some of us.” You couldn’t get more vague if you tried, but it was still the most Castillo had EVER told me about anything personal. All I had to do was sort out the pronouns. I assumed by “someone” he meant Kristin, and said so. He seemed surprised I knew her name, and I explained I’d picked it up when he’d spoken with Ox at the ballpark. He admitted she was the “someone.”

It was a start. So, naturally, I kept going.

I asked if she (Kristin) was the girl he spoke to on the phone sometimes. The person feeding him information about serial killers and whatnot as we traveled across the country together. (I’d kind of already put this together at this point but wanted confirmation all the same.)

No, he lied then. (He didn’t want to involve her yet. And I didn’t/don’t blame him.)

He would only admit to what Ox had already given up anyway. That Kristin was a psychiatrist who worked with soldiers who’d come back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a lot of bad memories and feelings. Guys now fighting depression, alcoholism, nightmares, rage, detachment from society, and thoughts of suicide. (These are all symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, a condition those who’ve been in war often develop.) It was her job to help soldiers get rid of, or at least manage, all those feelings.

And then Castillo admitted to me he was one of those guys. One who’d come home angry, always looking for a fight that never came. Filled with regrets. People he’d let down somehow. He’d learned from Kristin that talking to some of these people was the best thing to do. Often, however, he couldn’t talk to them. One way or another, a lot of ’em just weren’t around anymore.

So this Kristin woman taught this exercise where vets would try to face specific regrets, these “ghosts.” Instead of letting them haunt you, you just kinda meet ’em head-on. Talk it through.

He held up his hands to indicate the explanation was over, that it was so simple and silly, it hadn’t even been worth talking about.

But we both knew that was another lie.

•  •  •

30% of the soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with PTSD.

That’s more than 250,000 people.

It is believed that susceptibility to PTSD is genetic.

•  •  •

I then asked Castillo who Shaya was. Shaya was a name he’d mumbled in his sleep more than once. It totally freaked him out. I don’t think he had any idea. He told me only that Shaya was a boy he knew in Afghanistan during the war. Not something I talk about, he said. And he seemed sad. An emotion I honestly didn’t think he was capable of.

War’s stupid, I offered.

He agreed it was but then told me a cool story about fighting the Taliban when he was younger. Like a hundred guys with tanks and stuff on both sides. Bullets flying, guys yelling charges and orders and prayers in a dozen languages over the gunfire. And the US troops had
ridden horses. American Special Forces guys working with a powerful Afghani warlord against the Taliban. They’d had to cross this huge field, hundreds of guys, and the best way had been in waves of horses. Castillo’s whole face lit up when he told the story, and I asked Castillo if he liked being over there. If he liked war. I remember he said he “liked being good at something.”

Killing people, I verified.

He said: That’s not all we did. . . .

But you did, I said.

He agreed finally with a yup and added it was never something he
wanted
to do. Then I saw something in Castillo’s look that suggested it was time to drop the topic. So I did.

Instead I asked if he thought the guys were still coming here (he did) and then again what he would do with me when this was all over (he still didn’t know). It was honest but not very comforting. I suggested I could run away. Wondered if he’d still let me. Before, he HAD given me money to run away. Now, not so much. Instead he brought up about my being only sixteen and all, but I reminded him that kids did it all the time.

He agreed but seemed sad again. An emotion, perhaps, he carried more than I’d ever thought, now that I knew what to look for.

Then he handed me a book.
His
book.
The Odyssey.
The one he was always reading right before the few hours of sleep he got each night. The thing looked like it was fifty years old, it was so used and abused. Dozens of dog-eared pages and a spine broken in twenty different places. He told me to read a chapter called “A Gathering of Shades.”

Said it was about how to talk to ghosts.

•  •  •

That next day, I probably read that chapter a dozen times. The hero of the story, Ulysses, travels to the Underworld to get information and ends up talking to a bunch of dead people. To do this, he has to sacrifice a couple of sheep because it’s their blood that lures the shades/ghosts. As the ghosts gather around the fresh blood, he ends up talking to guys who died beside him at Troy, his own mother, a bunch of dead princes, and even a guy who killed himself because of Ulysses. He ends up learning a lot about where they’ve been and what’s been going on in the world while he’s been traveling. One of the ghosts, a famous oracle, even reveals Ulysses’s future. A future of eventual victory. And, of course, more blood.

Ghosts always want more blood.

•  •  •

That night, I ran away.

D
on’t blame
The Odyssey
. I was probably most likely headed that way anyway.

I just couldn’t take it anymore. Any of it. All of it. Sitting in that house like some kind of caged lab rat. I might as well have been back at DSTI again in some tank. I was sick of the faces of “my” victims appearing. Sick of the black dress lady. Sick of worrying about what my dad was up to. Or IF the other guys would actually show up. Or IF Castillo was starting to maybe like me or not or was gonna dump me in some ditch. Or IF I was really just some horrible monster.

My whole life had become a huge pile of IFs, and I felt like I was gonna explode if I sat there thinking about it for one second longer. Ulysses had his path. A path home. He’d been warned by the ghosts that everyone he was with would die but him and that things would get worse before it was over. And he’d taken the challenge.

I had no such promises and warnings. I had no mission. There was no HOME for me to go to. And no one was telling me things would get worse before it was over. All I was getting was MAYBEs and I DON’T KNOWs and WE’LL SEEs.

OK, maybe you
can
blame the book a little.

Castillo’d given me some money when it got dark and told me how to get to a convenience store a mile or so down the street. This was not because he hoped I’d run away. Quite the opposite. It was something to help make me STAY. Something to do. A chance to get out of the house. I think he recognized I was getting a little nutty wandering around that house.

By the time I reached the store, I’d decided just to keep walking. I had the $40 Castillo’d given me. Figured that was enough to do something.
Anything
. Get on a bus or something. Or walk to the next town and figure out what to do then. To do something ACTIVE. Not just sit around waiting for something to happen to me.

So I just walked straight past that gas station for another few miles.

•  •  •

This was not anything like the first time I ran away. I mean it was, I guess, if you were a total bystander watching me from afar go buy food but really meaning to leave Castillo forever. But the first time, Castillo had given me $100 with the clear hint that I wasn’t supposed to come back. He’d wanted me to take off. And I’d come back to prove to him (and maybe myself too) that I wasn’t some piece of shit to be discarded like that. THIS time, however, I really think Castillo trusted me and totally expected to see me back again. And any delusions that I wasn’t some piece of shit were, at least by my personal estimation, long, long gone.