But what it was, more, was that he looked like he was the only one really ALIVE. And everyone else, all the yapping middle-class white slob teens and their dads were all only half there and really just kinda scenery for whatever it was Castillo was doing. It was weird.
Later, I’d find out he’d been back in the US for only about a year.
Before, he’d spent close to fifteen years overseas. At war.
Then his more-ALIVE-than-everyone-else thing didn’t seem so weird.
• • •
Come on, Castillo said, and we moved deeper into the property to where the paintball version of “battlefields” were. It was tough to see faces because everyone was wearing masks, but we waited and watched. Nothing. Castillo kept us moving.
The largest field at ALLSTAR Paintball was covered in dozens of giant wooden spools and old trailers and even a two-story fort on each side. We watched from a small hill overlooking the field with about a dozen other people. There must have been forty people on each team. All screaming orders at each other and laughing and yelling. Someone even tossed a smoke grenade that landed in the middle of the grass field and made purple-gray smoke roll over a whole section of the playing area.
In that smoke with the masks, with everyone yelling like that, any one of them could have been Henry. Like this, ALL of them looked like the genetic offspring of some terrible killer.
I looked over the whole battlefield again, and it had changed.
A mound of burnt grass I hadn’t really noticed before, the way the purple-gray smoke snaked around one of the giant wood spools, the contour with which two players had thrown themselves to the ground for cover. The dead center of the field had started taking on a new look. The paintball ground slowly waning, fading into another shape altogether. One I recognized all too well. Its mouth opening in a silent scream of purple-gray smoke that—
I looked away.
Beside me, Castillo asked if I’d seen something.
No, I lied, and acted like I was looking at the field again but instead watched Castillo from the corner of my eye. There was no way I was EVER looking at the field again. Castillo waited and watched the players “die” one by one. But he wasn’t really watching them either, I could tell. He may have been looking at the field, but his eyes were shooting right through it like all those people weren’t even there. I could only imagine what he was really thinking about. At the time, I figured he was thinking about me. I know better now.
He waited for them to exit the field, taking off their masks when they came back through the netting. All strangers. Castillo showed a picture of Henry to one of the refs when he came off the field.
You some kind of cop? the high school kid asked, and laughed.
No, Castillo said. Nothing like that.
Behind him, the purple-gray smoke drifted up to the sun.
Still screaming.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The hotel was a dump. I’d never stayed somewhere so nasty. It smelled like cigarettes and dirt. I didn’t say anything, but Castillo must have read my face because he told me there were a lot worse places to stay.
We’d just entered the room when Castillo turned and locked the door. For the first time in my life, it didn’t feel like the world was being locked out. I was being locked IN.
Castillo waved me deeper into the room. Come here, he said.
My whole body half jumped into the ceiling. It finally dawned on me where I was and with who. A total stranger. Some lunatic who worked somehow with the same guys who’d busted into my house and stolen my lizard. I figured he’d finally gotten those orders from DSTI and was going to murder me just like my dad had warned. Steal my brain for science or something.
From a plastic bag the lunatic pulled out a pair of scissors.
OHMYGOD, OHMYGOD, OHMY—
We gotta do your hair, he said. (Note: This didn’t ease my concerns any.)
Still he kept waving me toward the dark bathroom. Said we had to cut and dye my hair. (My hair’s basically sandy blond. He now wanted it dark brown.) Explained people would be looking for me. Not the police. But DSTI or the government.
I asked: Aren’t YOU the government?
Castillo said they’d told him to find the six missing boys from Massey and that was it. The only reason he’d even come to my house at all was to maybe dig up some information on my dad, who was obviously involved in some way, information on where these six guys were and maybe even what had happened at Massey that night.
He said that if they—DSTI or his bosses—ever said he was supposed to find me, he’d give me a week’s head start and some money. (In retrospect, this was a cool thing to say. But at the time it just made him seem more terrifying than ever.)
And if they find me? I asked.
He didn’t know. Just said that he’d rather they didn’t.
I asked if they’d kill me.
He didn’t know.
It was true. He really didn’t.
And, for the first time, I kinda got it.
The room. The stupid hats. The hair.
He was just as afraid as I was. Afraid they’d find us. Of what would happen if they did. And I could tell he hated giving me that answer.
I don’t know.
I could tell that answer was one of the worst things he’d ever said.
I followed him into the bathroom, where he sat me on the john and cut all my hair. He was trying to be cool about it, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t on the verge of crying the whole time. Humiliated, abandoned, confused, scared. Every shitty feeling you could think of. And all at the same time.
He asked if I was OK, told me we were almost done.
I tried to keep still. Watched him mess with the gloves and mix the hair stuff.
You done this before? I asked.
He nodded.
I asked when, but he ignored me and just put that stuff in my hair. It smelled terrible, like vinegar, and stung my eyes.
Sorry, he said.
The way he said it, I knew he wasn’t just talking about my hair.
• • •
Five minutes later, I stood alone in the shower and kept my eyes closed tight as the smelly hair dye finished doing its job. It felt greasy in my fingers. When I opened my eyes, the dye’s residue still ran down my body and pooled at my feet in the water. Swirling away slowly down the drain and looking way too much like dark blood.
I kept thinking about those pictures, the ones taken at Massey. As I watched that dark “blood” roll over and through and around my toes, I kept trying to imagine what had really happened in the Activity Center. And I tried also to not think about it at all.
That’s when the dye started to take shape in the water.
A particular shape. Just a hint.
A jawline, maybe, and an eye forming on the right side that—
I closed my eyes again and held my face into the hot water. Then found the handle and turned until the water got colder, colder, colder. . . . Chasing all thoughts away. Anything I might have seen.
I hid in that shower a long, long time.
• • •
When I got out, I looked like I was maybe six years old in the mirror. Momentously stupid. My hair all hacked away and dark. I dried off and put my clothes back on. I hid in the bathroom as long as I could. Eventually, Castillo shouted to me, asked if everything was OK. I said yeah. Still, I waited another few minutes.
He was working at the small desk in the room with his laptop and a map and a bunch of papers. I moved past him as carefully and quietly as possible and got to my bed. I just wanted to curl up and die, really. I was so tired. So miserable. I kept thinking if I could just get some sleep, maybe . . .
Didn’t happen. Castillo had other plans. Said he had something else for me to focus on.
Um, OK. . . . My voice trailed off with all the eeriness and alarm suddenly oozing through my whole body.
Francis Tumblety, he said.
I had no idea who that was, and told him a
s much.
He held up his smartphone.
Showed me pic of a small withered corpse stuffed like a ventriloquist’s dummy in a small box.
Yeah, that guy.
• • •
My father, as I’d suspected from the start, had not murdered Francis Tumblety.
Turns out this guy’d been dead in the New York ground since 1903.
My father did, however (Castillo had the journal entries and even a homemade video to prove it), dig him back up and stuff him in a pseudo-fridge in our house.
For, as I’d also suspected, his DNA.
And this guy had MOST DEFINITELY been chosen for his serial-killer potential. Two reasons:
First, because Francis Tumblety was maybe Jack the Ripper.
Refresher: Jack the Ripper was the world’s first famous serial killer. Murdered probably a dozen women in London in the 1880s. And the murders were quite bloody and quite sexual, and the police couldn’t ever catch him and there were, like, two hundred newspapers working in London at the time. And they all made him famous for killing people because (a) it helped sell all those papers, and (b) England ruled the whole world back then and this one guy was like a foot-long bloody turd in their Victorian punch bowl. Jack the Ripper was their 9/11. He reminded civilized society that nobody is ever, ever really safe from the monsters. There is always another one waiting down the next dark alley. Behind the shower curtain. Under the bed. On an airplane. In a movie theater or even some kindergarten classroom.
And I say he was maybe Jack the Ripper because no one really knows who Jack the Ripper was. Dude was never caught, and there are literally, like, twenty possible culprits. For a hundred years now different camps and fans (called “Ripperologists”) have argued about who he really was. Yes, “FANS.” Turns out there are a lot of people who are kinda into serial killers. They find it interesting somehow. I guess that same way people find the Holocaust or Having-Your-Face-Ripped-off-by-a-Monkey “interesting.” (More on this lameness later.)
As for Ripperologists, my father was unquestionably on Team Tumblety.
That, in and of itself, wasn’t that big a deal. Again, if it was your job to collect the DNA of famous serial killers, getting ahold of the real Jack’s DNA was like finding a box of Einstein’s math homework. A new play by Shakespeare. A living Bigfoot. The Holy Grail.
But that wasn’t the only reason my father wanted this man’s DNA.
Or why his old dead body was in my house instead of some lab room at DSTI.
Or why my father had personally, and at great expense, dug the body up himself.
My father had done all those things for another reason.
And that reason, the REAL reason, it turned out, was kinda terrible.
CHAPTER EIGHT
My dad thinks he’s Jack the Ripper?
I couldn’t believe I’d just said these words out loud.
And I didn’t mean the actual Jack the Ripper, who’d been dead for more than a hundred years. (My dad wasn’t that crazy.) Rather that my father believed he was the Ripper’s descendant. His genetic offspring. That Jack the Ripper’s blood and DNA lived on somehow in his body.
Castillo said he didn’t really understand it himself yet either. Only that this was all in my father’s journals. The ones I’d been unwilling to read that Castillo had now pored over for almost two straight days. And in these journals my dad apparently wrote there was some kind of connection between him and this Tumblety guy. Karmic, cosmic. Genetic. Related by blood, probably. And, according to Castillo, my father’d been writing about this stuff for years. Even before I’d been born/made.
Castillo asked if my dad had ever said anything to me about any of this. About Tumblety and all. He hadn’t. But I totally remembered seeing Tumblety’s name in my father’s secret office the one time I’d gone in. Castillo then asked if my dad had ever talked about Jack the Ripper. He hadn’t. I kept searching my memories for something—anything.
Castillo handed me his phone and told me he had some more pages from the journals he wanted me to read. Some things my father had apparently written about all of this. About Tumblety and the Ripper and all. Castillo hoped maybe something would trigger an idea or memory, some hint as to what my dad might be up to, or, even, where he might be.
Castillo’s next sentence trailed off.
He wanted to warn me. Warn me about what I was about to see. That all the squiggles and chickens and old corpses were only the start. He was looking for the right words to capture the fact that my father was—based on the evidence in the journals—completely insane. And I couldn’t blame Castillo for that. Because my own mind was searching for those exact same words.
He asked me to read only as much as I could.
I did not get very far.
• • •
I will spare you the exact details of what I did read.
The short of it is:
(a) My father had a troubled childhood plagued by nightmares that developed into an abnormal relationship with women in general. (b) The nightmares were primarily focused on a specific dead woman. He did not recognize her. And whether she was a suppressed memory of some kind or totally imagined didn’t matter. As the years went on, her draw on him became greater and greater. It became, even, some form of love. (c) He called this woman the THING ON THE BED. (d) One day, while reading a book about Jack the Ripper, he saw a picture of one of the victims, a horrible picture from more than a hundred years ago. (e) My father recognized her instantly, and everything, his whole life, suddenly made sense. This THING ON THE BED was simply some genetic memory passed down to him through inheritance (just like blue eyes or small feet) from his ancestor Jack the Ripper.
• • •
The government now has these journals.
• • •
I’d stopped reading. The words on the screen were blurry anyway.
Exhaustion. Tears.
I handed Castillo his phone back. Told him nothing had really jumped out at me.
He just kinda stared at me. Told me to get some rest or put on the TV if I wanted. I didn’t know what else to do, so I took it as an order more than anything else. I couldn’t tell you what I watched that night. It was just an hour of lights and colors flickering on the screen at this point, the sound little more than white noise.
All the while, Castillo just kept working at that desk. Looking stuff up. Gathering information. I don’t know. I didn’t want to ask. (He always looked so angry then, you know?)
It was the first time I could really watch him up close without him looking back, and I finally got a good look at all his scars. They ran all up and down both his arms. Deep pink-white scratches. Almost like tattoos. I didn’t have the guts to ask.
Later, I’d see all the others.
Eventually he looked over and caught me staring at him. He asked what I wanted. He looked like he wanted to punch me in the face or something. I got this impression a lot from Castillo at the start.
I asked if there was anything else I could do to help.
He said: Is there?
We both knew the same thing.
There wasn’t.
Every assignment he’d already given me (my dad’s doodles, the mall, looking through my dad’s journals) had led to nothing. Just my saying NO a lot and us not finding anyone.
So he looked at me like I was a piece of crap again, and I sat there stupid for a long while and then just rolled over to maybe get some sleep.
I couldn’t even do that.
• • •
But I kept my eyes closed and pretended to sleep. I was so very tired. Couldn’t believe I wasn’t just passing out immediately. But I kept thinking so much about my dad. And I tried not thinking so much about my dad. And it wasn’t easy. It’s like trying not to think about a PURPLE COW. Go ahead, try. Once it’s in there, it’s in there. And all these notions of my dad, over what his life had been and was. And these personal demons he’d been carrying around all those years. It was clear I didn�
��t really know the guy. What he was truly capable of. I needed . . . I needed to think about something else. Get this particular purple cow out of my brain awhile.
So I thought about my mother.
Both of them.
• • •
The first one in the pictures.
The one who was supposed to have died in a car crash of some kind. Her face, which I’d known so well a day before, was already becoming a blur to me. Like my mind knew to just write her off as complete make-believe. I wondered who the blond boy with her in the one picture was. If it was really me. Or just some random blond kid. Were even the pictures of ME fake? Where had my father found her? Had they really been married? Was she just a model/actress they’d picked out to play a part? How much had they paid her to be my mom for three photos? How much was such a thing worth? I pursued a formless memory of visiting her grave. Bringing flowers to her grave. I envisioned my father standing over me. Cool wind in dark lonely trees above both of us. Had I invented this memory? Or had it been given to me? Had my father simply TOLD me we’d done this, and I’d processed it into my memories with so many other lies? Worse, had he maybe taken me to some random grave and said Say Good-bye to Your Mother? All those years I’d fought to remember anything and everything about her. And I’d fought the guilt of failing at that one simple thing. Her face slipping away from me like a dandelion ball drifting farther and farther out of reach. Memories of how she’d sounded and the things we’d done together before the accident. Memories that had never been.
And then my thoughts turned to my BIRTH mother.
The woman who’d only carried me for a few months. From the folder my father had given me, I knew she was from somewhere in Ukraine. I knew she’d been young and that they’d paid her. That’s all I would ever know. How many other babies had she carried? How many other women had done this exact same thing for DSTI? She’d carried me just four months. The rest of the time after that, more than a year, I’d been in some kind of pod. A vat of fluids while they’d grown me to just the right size for Dr. Jacobson. I had no memory of this. And yet, that first night in that motel with Castillo, I could just about make out the buttery fluid. Warm and salty. Completely surrounding me as I turned, floated, in the room’s darkness. In my mind, I lifted my hands. Slowly opened my eyes in the thick fluid.
Project Cain (Project Cain) Page 5