The Walls of the Castle

by Tom Piccirilli

  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 li
ke 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.