The Lost Castle

by Nick Cole

  How were things back at the... castle? He thought of all those dead crashing into it and hoped it was indeed a castle. That it had become an impenetrable fortress. That Frank had been right.

  He thought of Ash.

  He pulled the walkie-talkie off his belt.

  “Frank...”

  Nothing.

  “Frank, this is me... Holiday.”

  Still nothing.

  “I’m at the base. At the thing we saw... here. I’m going in.”

  Nothing.

  He felt awkward talking to himself.

  “All right...” and Don’t give up on me, he thought.

  “C’mon,” he said to Jesus, and headed down into the shadow of the fantastic structure rising above everything on the Marine base that once was. Maybe he could find some guns... or something. Anything to help his friends. That was what he was telling himself as the feeling of unquiet power, barely restrained, seemed to pulse outward in weird waves just below his consciousness. But it was there. Coming from the strange edifice. Coming out at him.

  And it grew.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The chorus of moaning dead is rising beyond the walls. As though their gurgle-groans and grave whispers are too heavy to climb all the way into the hot sun-parched sky. Instead, their continual murder-muttering falls back down into the courtyard, and for a moment Frank thinks they’ve broken through some new gap in the walls.

  His walls. That they might be inside and swarming.

  He never thinks about cutting and running.

  Like Ritter does as he climbs up to the roof and sees the frightened look on Candace’s face. Like Dante does as he holds the ladder that’s shaking as Frank works his way up onto the balcony they must soon enter the overrun townhome unit through.

  Frank can feel how unsteady the ladder is. He knows Dante will have trouble coming up it.

  He sees Cory still staring at some new flower by the pool. Following a bee with his motionless body and watchful eyes.

  “Hey,” Frank yells, his voice a booming blast that catches everyone’s attention. But he can’t remember Cory’s name. Because he’s seen him until now as nothing but a liability. Nothing but a...

  “... Hey, Batman!”

  Cory turns, his mouth open. Watching Frank. “I need you to hold this ladder, Batman.”

  Frank watches as Ash waves to Cory. A moment later Cory is loping awkwardly, his body movements neither swift nor graceful, across the street from the pool and into the hot square of the parking courtyard and the surrounding garages that form the outer wall.

  Dante shows the large man-boy how to hold the ladder, then fixes Frank with a glare which leaves little doubt that he hates everything about this situation. A second later he starts climbing up after Frank.

  Frank has secured the pulley and rope they’ll use to haul the big sheet of galvanized metal up. A few minutes later, they’re pulling for all they’re worth as the heavy sheet of metal rises slowly into the air.

  “Get back...” grunts Frank, and again can’t think of Cory’s name. “Kid,” he whispers. Dante knows Cory hasn’t heard this, so he shouts down for him to get back. Obediently Cory steps away and watches, fascinated.

  On the far roof, Ritter and Candace are banging lead pipes against the railings along the balconies to get the piling dead away from the gap in the wall. Ritter is taking dangerous chances lowering himself to just out of the scabby reaches of the grasping corpse arm forest to move them along toward the gate. One of them suddenly leaps upward and catches the railing Ritter is passing over. The narrow balcony of a townhome master suite.

  It’s pulling itself over the rail when Ritter jumps down onto the balcony and smacks it in the head with his lead pipe. The thing’s head hangs crazily to the side, but it’s not letting go of the railing. In fact, another corpse is starting to use it, a bearded hipster in spandex workout gear, never mind the rotting flesh, as some kind of ladder to claw its way closer to Ritter.

  Ritter smashes the pipe repeatedly into the hanging thing’s hands and arms, but it’s no use. The corpse-hipster is reaching out for him. Snarling at him.

  The hanging corpse is on the verge of falling in when Ritter pulls his snub-nosed .357 and puts a bullet in its brain. The body instantly goes slack and Ritter pushes it off the railing. It and the hipster fall, arms akimbo onto the writhing mass below, where they disappear beneath a forest of corpse feet.

  Frank looks down the street. He can’t see Ash and he knows it’s time for her to go over the wall. He knows this whole thing is badly coordinated and that someone’s not just going to get hurt, someone is probably going to die.

  There’s no plan.

  It’s bound to happen, but he prays it doesn’t.

  “Ready, big man?” he asks Dante. “We’ll clear ‘em out first. Then you grab that sheet of metal and bring it down to the gap. I’ll hold them off.” Frank is gripping the wicked fire axe halfway up the haft. Rivulets of sweat stream down Dante’s face. He nods mutely at Frank and licks his lips. He looks like he’s on the verge of throwing up.

  Frank doesn’t say “let’s go,” or anything else for that matter. He merely slides the glass door to the balcony aside and slips through the crack into unit twenty-seven.

  Within moments, they’re standing at the top of a narrow flight of stairs listening to the grunts and racket below. A large bedroom with an unmade bed and almost no furnishings is off to the right. A smaller bedroom to the left. A single bathroom in the hall. Some pictures along the wall of a family that’s not alive anymore. Frank is sure of that.

  When?

  On the day. The day it all went bad. That’s when they died.

  Or...

  After, when the big fire burned down all the McMansions. Or when Holiday left the gates open and all those dead had to be “cleaned.” Because they’d been dead like the people beyond the wall. And they’d needed to be cleaned.

  Cleaned?

  Cleaned.

  Had to be... cleaned. Just like that day with Ash. When Holiday disappeared to go drinking and left the gate open. And that time in Marseille. Like that.

  Cleaned.

  ***

  The goombah comes back into the little club on the Rue de la Croix the next night and nothing happens. Nothing. He drinks with two French bimbos, tells Frank he’s the greatest and leaves around eleven. Later, after the last set, the owner of the club, a man everyone simply calls Izzo, comes backstage to tell Frank and the Japanese musicians they’re being held over for a week.

  Three nights later, a redhead comes in as Frank is halfway through Nice and Easy. She’s wearing a green silk dress, silver heels and earrings, and everyone, including Frank and the drummer who always looks at nothing but his kit, watches her walk across the tiny club. She sits and produces a long cigarette which some guy lights. Then she inhales and casts a bored, dismissive glance across the sea of patrons jamming the club nightly to hear Frank. Some record producer from a Paris label has even made the drive down to offer Frank a recording contract on some obscure French Lounge Pop label.

  But the redhead. She’s Italian. Va-va-voom Sophia Loren-Italian right down to her dark cat’s eyes and long curling lashes.

  Within moments the goombah has sent over a bucket of Izzo’s finest prosecco, and a red jacketed waiter, hands shaking, is fumbling with the cork and trying not to burst into flames because of his near proximity to this stunning beauty.

  Frank wraps up Nice and Easy and turns back to the band. What a knockout, he’s thinking of the beauty at the table in front of him. The vision of her is burned permanently into his brain.

  “Luck be a Lady,” he whispers, and the Japanese nod deftly without any emotion. But they all look a little shaky.

  It had to be you, he thinks. That’s her song, really. Except that’s the song you’ve always imagined singing
to, no with, the love of your life as you grew old together. Isn’t that right?

  “Yeah,” Frank whispers to himself and gets ready for the next song. That’s right.

  He doesn’t see the little guy. The guy who came in right after her. The little guy in the white dinner jacket. Pete Malloy. Soon everyone watches the mobster and the girl drink and laugh, and later when the mobster leaves, even Frank sees the matchbook with his number printed on the cover. He leaves it on the table next to her.

  After midnight. In the Marseille fog that was unusually heavy that year, Pete Malloy follows Frank and the musicians back to their hotel-by-the-week, and as they approach the door, the small man moves swiftly to intercept Frank.

  “Hey buddy,” he whispers.

  Frank turns.

  There’s a nod. A nod Frank has been waiting for, and he tells the other musicians he’ll be along shortly. When they’re gone, Pete Malloy steps closer.

  “Tomorrow night after the second set, when he leaves,” and there’s no doubt who the “he” is. The goombah. The mobster. The German. Nials Abruzzi. “Tell them you can’t do the last set. I’ll meet you in the alley. Be ready.” Then he turns and before Frank can get a word out, the man is gone, and twenty feet later, because of the white dinner jacket no doubt, the fog has swallowed him whole. Frank hears the distant slap of patent leather on the wet cobblestones of Marseille. And after a moment not even that.

  She comes in again that next night. A silver dress. Very short. Red hair in luxuriant piles. Pale skin and curves no one can stop themselves from staring at.

  Halfway through the first set, the mobster shows and makes straight for her table.

  And it’s clear they couldn’t care less about the music. Their laughs are too short, and nothing compared to the intense and hungry gaze coming from each of them. As though the rest of the world and Frank included, doesn’t exist.

  Lucky guy, thinks Frank.

  And...

  It had to be you.

  And...

  Guess not.

  Before the second set is over, they’ve upended the bottle of Vieuv Cliquot in the bucket and they’re gone, arm in arm, into the night.

  The second set is done and Frank tells Yoshi the guitarist he’s not feeling well. He steps out into the wet narrow alley and finds Malloy in a brand new Citroen. Frank slides in and soon they’re knifing through narrow fog-shrouded streets. A few tight blocks later, they pick up the car and it’s clear to Frank who they’re following. They wind out of the harbor district and make the coast road. It’s late and the fog swirls up at them in cloudy banks from the shores of the coastline as the headlights cut like knives into its depths. Malloy turns off the wan headlights on the tiny French car and they follow the one ahead of them along the coast, its two headlights like broad searchlights casting across the night and fog ahead.

  “What’s this all about?” asks Frank.

  Malloy shoots him a quick, hard look and says nothing.

  A moment later he says, “This is your audition, mate.”

  Frank can tell the man is using all his skill and concentration to keep the car on the winding road in the dark. At times they pass small beaches where the waves wash lazily against sand made silver by the moonlit night. At other times they crawl through the fog hoping not to smash into some oncoming lorry. Or a drunk. Or some other maniac driving without their headlights in the night.

  “Audition for what, exactly?” asks Frank. Not without contempt.

  A quick glance from Malloy. The man’s eyes are beady and hard. And Frank thinks maybe this is on the cusp of going too far. Going to a place you can’t come back from. The record producer from Paris had offered him a contract. He could get out of this. Go another direction. Whatever this is, and truth be told, he has no idea what this is other than... dark forces at work? He realizes how much he has no idea what this is all about. And no idea where it’s going.

  One last thought...

  So... maybe it’s time to get out then.

  The little engine of the Citroen. The smell of the night beyond the windows. The darkness ahead surrounding the two high beams in the distance.

  Cut and run then?

  Not me, thinks Frank. Never was.

  I’m the guy who sticks.

  For better or for worse. That’s me.

  Malloy inhales, his tiny shoulders rising, then exhales, gripping the wheel tighter. Rolling his neck once. Focused on the narrow coast road ahead.

  His voice is staccato. No emotion. Just the facts in machinegun-hard cadences. That’s the way the guy speaks.

  “This is a war. That guy from the club. He’s not who you think he is.”

  Malloy pauses to downshift into a tight s-turn along the coast, just feet from the crashing surf. “He’s a kind of monster. A kind of monster who works for a real live monster.” Silence as they top the rise.

  Frank struggles with the word monster. Surely, he thinks, the man said mobster. Didn’t he?

  “The world is a much worse place because of him. And the bad news is, it’s going to get a lot worse than you can ever imagine.”

  The fog completely swallows the road ahead, and there is nothing but mist and sand drifting across the front windshield of the Citroen. It is entirely possible, in a terrifyingly quick moment, that they might see the mobster coming out of the fog, car across the road. Gun in hand. Aimed straight at them.

  Or did he say... monster?

  There would be nothing we could do if that happened, thinks Frank.

  “Name’s Malloy,” says the small man. He looks at Frank once and quickly. Frank sees sincerity. Nothing but. “I was like you, once,” continues Malloy. “Didn’t have all the facts. And then after the Island, I knew what the game was. I knew what it was all about. What was on the line. Then I was in, mate. All in. Because...” he concentrates as they enter a long slow curve beside a rocky point that juts out into the charcoal dark of the Mediterranean night.

  A few hundred feet past the lonely point, a narrow track leads down through tall scrub on the other side of the road. Malloy pulls off and follows the narrow lane. Frank can make out Malloy’s features by the barest light thrown from the instrument panel. He’s sweating. His tiny features are like a weasel’s, or some other small determined yet ferocious animal. A moment later they pull off under some tiny coastal trees, bent and twisted by the winds that come and go, the Sirocco they call it. Malloy lets the car drift to a stop and sets the emergency handbrake. Ahead, a large three-story villa waits against the coast. It is midnight.

  They sit in the silence of the lonely night and a small candle appears in a high window after a few moments. The rest of the place is absent of light, or life. As though it is rarely used, or even deserted.

  Malloy reaches under the seat of the Citroen and pulls out a wrapped silenced pistol.

  “Like I said, I was once like you. This is where you...” Malloy places the now unwrapped weapon on the dash in front of Frank. “Become like me.”

  The night is silent, save for the muted crash of surf against the point.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Malloy says nothing. Just watches Frank. Looking for something that’s supposed to appear now.

  “I’m not a killer,” states Frank.

  “Yeah, you are. Otherwise, and I don’t know your past, don’t know your story, mate, don’t want to, but otherwise he wouldn’t have sent you to us. So whatever you are... you’re a killer also.”

  Frank stares at the flat black pistol. The long silencer. It’s a forty-five. Terrible weapon for a mob hit. Twenty-two is the way to go. Every hood in Chicago knows that. Every kid who knows the hoods like they’re famous baseball players knows that too. And Frank had known enough to know it also. The forty-five is too powerful. Too loud. Too much bang. Too much attention.

  “This ain’t the
mob, Frank,” says Malloy, seeming to read Frank’s thoughts. “But it’s a hit all the same.”

  The night fog washes up along the stretch of open gravel between the villa and the coast, creeping through the gnarled olive trees and low feathery brush.

  “I can’t tell you anything other than you do this and you’ll be glad you did. You’ll understand... once you get to the Island.”

  Frank thinks about the club and the record producer. A career on the French charts. All those finer things. Those other things. That different possible other life if he just gets out of the car and walks back to Marseilles tonight.

  “Pick up the gun and go in there. Eliminate the target, mate. Time to clean, Frank. That’s what we do. We clean.”

  “Why?” asks Frank in the late hour silence. Malloy watches the villa. Waiting. He sighs.

  “Because someone’s got to,” he says. “Simple as that. Can’t even tell you what we’re doing. Only that it’s just got to be done for all the right reasons. I know that’s hard, mate. Real hard to accept on faith. But that’s the way it is.”

  Frank picks up the gun, feels its weight and heft. Checks the load. Magazine is full. He steps out of the car still not actually believing, or understanding, why he’s doing this. What he’s about to do. Like that Marine LT said...

  Maybe he’ll just take the gun and leave. No. he won’t. The LT was right.

  “Make sure it’s a headshot, mate. Trust me,” whispers Malloy.

  It’s every day.

  He’s crossing the gravel parking lot toward the dark villa.

  The wide, salt-faded and rotten double front door isn’t locked. No, not at all. He pushes it slightly open and steps in, the gun and silencer leading the way, pointing toward some impending conclusion.

  It’s not like being back in ‘Nam. But it’s close enough. Dangerously close.

  Beyond the front entrance is a large low-ceilinged hall with an old gray wooden trestle table and some odd pieces of furniture waiting in the shadows. Frank can hear the distant slough and pull of the night surf coming from the coast.

  Time to clean.