Project Cain (Project Cain)

by Geoffrey Girard

  I dared a final look, but the curtain had already shut again.

  • • •

  Yeah. I think I was going crazy.

  • • •

  We drove all that night, the other cars and roadside signs moving by in soft fluid blurs of light and color. It felt almost like moving back through time. I didn’t know where we were going, but I don’t think Castillo did either. This, surprisingly, helped some. I relaxed knowing that he was just maybe—just a touch, even—as lost and confused as I was. Ha!

  I put the seat back some, tried sleeping again. My eyes were so heavy. I hadn’t slept for real in a couple of days now. No wonder I was seeing strange women in black dresses. No wonder that delusional monsters from my father’s journal (delusions he’d called the THING ON THE BED)—yes, I recognized her for what she was—had somehow become my very own delusions. My own waking nightmares.

  Though my father hadn’t ever specifically described the THING ON THE BED in the journal writings I’d yet seen, the likeness of her had still, obviously, taken root in my brain. I’d somehow, just like my dad, personified this imaginary woman.

  We weren’t even related by blood, apparently, and yet somehow my father had infected me anyway. Madness, apparently, was contagious enough without any need for REAL genetics.

  The THING ON THE BED had become the THING AT THE WINDOW in a hurry.

  There was no doubt that in my twisted mind she’d become the THING CHILLIN’ IN THE BACKSEAT OF THE CAR if I didn’t get some real sleep in a hurry.

  I settled back into the seat, tried relaxing, wrestling away the terrifying chill that very last thought had given me, of that woman sitting directly behind me. Our eyes meeting in the rearview mirror. I shivered the image off. And, even if she had been REAL, some sort of ghost from my father’s nightmares who’d found her way into the waking world, Castillo was here.

  I’d just seen what he could do. Why should I be concerned, afraid, of some weird lady in a weird mask and black dress? Castillo was still probably the scariest thing I’d ever met.

  This would change, of course.

  And soon.

  • • •

  I slept, but it was not good sleep. Far, far from it. In the dream, she was standing in the park surrounded by little children. The Woman. Dozens of little boys and girls played in a circle, chasing and romping around her black dress. Clapping and giggling and saying words I couldn’t quite understand. Dream words. In the distance behind them, dark shapes moved about the swing set and wooden fort. There were six dark shapes. One waved to me. I could see his terrible smile. Hey, Jeffrey! he said, and laughed. Behind them, still another shape. Taller. Darker. My father. I started moving toward him, but with every step, he seemed farther and farther away from me. I tried calling to him, but nothing. No words would come. In fact, silence had captured everything. There was no sound anywhere now. I looked at The Woman again. Her black dress had grown, was swelling and spreading out in every direction like a living thing. And the children were dropping down into it. Vanishing. The blackness enfolded them. Embraced. Enclosed. For they’d all stopped moving and playing. They just stood completely still as if paralyzed, all of their heads turned to me, like deer in headlights or a row of dolls on a shelf. First one child and then another and another and . . . Gone. Until all were absorbed into her total blackness. The dark continued to spread, noiselessly swilling over the seesaw and rope bridge. Toward me. I tried stepping backward but found I could not move either. The dark curled first around my toes. Cold. Cold and yet comforting. I knew that if I gave myself over to it, just let it enfold my body, everything would be fine again. I wouldn’t know pain or fear or worry ever again. Still, I tried screaming again. Dad!!! Nothing. I tried looking back toward the swing set, but he and the others were gone. The blackness had moved to my legs. I looked directly at her now for the first time. I wanted to see that painted face as the darkness consumed me completely. But her face had changed. The big gaping doll eyes and red cheeks and lips were gone. Now the eyes were enormous blue triangles. And the mouth a huge jagged smile that covered the whole bottom half of her face in red. Sharp points up as if smiling, but just looked like thick bloody fangs. It was the face of a painted jack-o’-lantern. Or a monstrous clown. Freezing cold raced up my back and chest, wrapping tight around my throat like icy hands. Strangling me as I stood rooted in place. Its face widened, the blood-red mouth stretching open to reveal more blackness. The invisible hands in the darkness enfolding me squeezed tighter still, trapping my last breath like another soundless scream in my throat. . . .

  • • •

  I jerked awake. Pressed my arm against the car door to steady myself. My whole body still shaking. Still cold.

  Castillo was driving, asked if I was all right. Hadn’t even looked over.

  Yeah, I lied.

  • • •

  We ate at a Steak ’n Shake at, like, two in the morning. I think it was the best meal I’ve ever had in my whole life. I told Castillo just that.

  Me too, he said.

  But he said it sarcastic. He was just being mean.

  • • •

  Castillo got us a room at the Baymont Inn early that next morning. We both collapsed into our beds immediately, but I don’t think either one of us slept very much. I knew when I woke, it’d be another day of watching TV with the sound off and trying to stay out of Castillo’s way. Of trying to think of some way, any way, to help.

  For the first time I thought about giving Castillo my father’s phone number. The new one he’d told me to call if I needed anything. The number he hadn’t answered that whole first night and the next day, too. Maybe he’d pick up if Castillo rang. Maybe he and Castillo could work this whole thing out together. Figure out what had really happened at DSTI and where these six guys were and even how to get my dad back home.

  They both seemed like two guys who could handle something as simple as that.

  This is the thought I carried as I finally slipped into glorious unconsciousness.

  Hey. Jacobson . . .

  It was Castillo. Already shaking me awake. It felt like only four seconds had passed, but, squinting at the room’s little digital clock, I saw that it had been most of the morning. It was past noon.

  I fought to wake. Sat up, reached around for my glasses.

  We gotta go, he said. Told me to hurry up. He was staring at his smartphone.

  Where? I asked groggily.

  Harrisburg, he said.

  We’re going to a baseball game, he said.

  It was not, you’ll agree, the strangest thing I’d heard that week.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Harrisburg Senators were hosting the Erie SeaWolves. I’d never heard of either team and was only vaguely aware of the cities. The minor-league ballpark in Harrisburg was mostly packed, maybe five thousand people. After several days living in almost constant silence in my own house, the car, and a twenty-by-twenty motel room, you’d think I would have welcomed all their company. I didn’t. I actually found their combined noise and bustle kinda distressing.

  We were there for some guy called Ox.

  He was some contact of Castillo’s who might know something about what was going on. Specifically about what Shardhara was and what my father’s notes on that might mean. Funny. With, like, several teenage serial killers running around in the world, Castillo was apparently still mostly interested in this one map and cryptic mentions of this Shardhara place. And I also could tell Castillo was a little nervous about the meeting. It wasn’t like he’d just called this Ox guy on the phone and they’d agreed to get together. Apparently Castillo had had to use special foreign websites and routers with hard-core cryptogram stuff to reach this guy. And even then it had just been a long shot that this guy would ever write back. He moved around a lot, was hard to get ahold of. But he did write back, and so there we were. What concerned Castillo the most, I think, was the speed with which Ox had set up the meeting. Sure, it had taken him a couple of days t
o get Castillo’s message, but once he had, it was: Bam! Meet me in Harrisburg somewhere public.

  Castillo bought the tickets and led us to our seats somewhere past third and closer to the outfield. I don’t even think he went to where our tickets were for. I stayed close behind him the whole way. He stopped briefly and paid ten bucks for the program and bought us two Cokes and four hot dogs when we sat down. Not because he thought I was hungry or anything. I knew it was all just part of the disguise. Camouflage. Making us look as normal as possible. I had to give him credit for trying.

  I asked Castillo how long it would be before this Ox guy showed up. Castillo, of course, totally ignored my question. He was excellent at that. I’d grown up with adults hanging on my every word. Tutors, speech therapists, counselors, my dad . . . This guy gave me as much thought as the hot dog he’d just eaten. So I settled into my seat and kept quiet. Tried following the pregame stuff. There was a guy dressed as a giant tooth being chased around the bases by a little kid (still no clue what that was about), and then a race between two fans from the stands now dressed up as Mr. Ketchup and Mr. Mustard. I had never been to a baseball game before.

  It was not the kind of place my father had ever taken me.

  • • •

  To that point, I know next to nothing about sports. I discovered this on one of my soccer teams when the other guys were talking excitedly about people I’d never heard of. So I studied sports the way I studied history or geometry. Spent a good half an hour every day. It wasn’t too hard to look up on the Internet the names and teams I needed to know. This is also how I learned about important things like popular movies and music and popular Web stuff. Important if you don’t want to look like the horribly clichéd, homeschooled, spelling bee geek. But being homeschooled had nothing to do with it, did it?

  My “peers” were—unknown to me at the time—all eight years older than I was. And when they’d all been watching Family Guy for the hundredth time, I’d been—I now understood—just learning to talk.

  • • •

  The stadium announcer’s deep steady voice echoed over the whole stadium like the voice of God, and the God voice was saying something about “Bark in the Park” (an upcoming event for dogs) and Applebee’s Military Monday, when all veterans could attend the game for free. I imagined the same voice saying, WHERE IS ABEL, THY BROTHER? WHAT HAST THOU DONE?

  When they did the National Anthem, I put my hand over my heart like Castillo and everyone else, but when everyone else cheered and clapped at the end, Castillo just sat down. So I did that also. The SeaWolves were up, and after the very first batter got on base, it was a pop-up to the catcher, and then the third batter hit into a double play to end the inning. The home crowd cheered. It was a good sound. I flipped absently through the program Castillo had bought. The first Senators player, a little guy named Hackman out of Ohio, took a high strike for the first pitch. The crowd booed the umpire. Castillo sat, still and patient, beside me. The next pitch, the guy knocked the heck out of it, and it went sailing up and out. Everyone but Castillo tensed for half a second and then settled back as the ball sailed foul right, deep into the stands directly across from us. The stadium’s JumboTron in center field showed a couple of kids scrambling around their seats for the ball. Kinda funny. On the screen one of them finally lifted his hand up with the prize.

  I looked back across the field to where, for real, the ball had just landed.

  That’s when I saw the face of Richard Guerrero.

  At least fifty feet high and thirty across. A giant’s face absorbing—or more like superimposed on, maybe—whole sections of the stadium.

  • • •

  Before I explain who Richard Guerrero is, I need to explain the faces.

  Have only tried to do this three times in my whole life. This’ll be the fourth and last.

  First time was to a counselor at the Massey Institute. I was, I thought, maybe eleven or twelve at the time. She prodded me for as much detail as possible and then wrote down everything I said. She’d given me no thoughts at all on what this was or how to fix it. She’d, in retrospect, merely been gathering data for my father and his colleagues. They’d probably been thrilled. The second time had been with Amanda Klosterman, a girl I’d met at science camp. The third time would be Castillo. You’re fourth.

  For as long as I can remember (over however many years we’re calling my life), I have seen faces in very odd places. In clouds, the wood grain of a table at some restaurant, within a shelf of books, a folded shower curtain, a dirty pile of clothing.

  Or, as another example, in a paintball field, or even in dyed water running down a shower drain. . . . You get the idea.

  Scientists call this phenomenon “pareidolia”—when people recognize shapes, patterns, and familiar objects in random stuff. One of the most popular forms of pareidolia is recognizing faces. A toaster or the back of a car or pancake or whatever looks kinda like a face. There’s eye potential, a mouth, maybe a nose. Experts claim it’s so important as a survival instinct for us to recognize and respond to the countless forms of the human face that we’re looking for them constantly, unconsciously. So just about everyone recognizes something that looks like a face every now and then and in the most unexpected of places. Some people just do it more than others.

  The faces I saw were more complicated than two circles for eyes and a straight-lined mouth. What I saw usually had hair, eyebrows, lips, ears. Shades of color. Eyes with pupils and everything. For years I wrote it off as coincidence. A funny trick of the light. My stupid imagination. But then I just kept seeing them. Not every day or even every month. But every couple of months for sure and sometimes for a couple of days in a row. (I was clearly in hyperdrive this week!) Eventually I realized there were patterns in what I was seeing. For instance, I could tell now that all the faces were the faces of men. Some of them had white faces, but most of the others were darker. At first I thought it was just the same face shown different ways.

  But these were distinct and familiar faces. The same ten, maybe more, guys, over and over. I didn’t know any of them then. I couldn’t connect them to real people in my life. I figured they might be people I knew from “before the accident.” Some half-formed memory. And, in a way, they were.

  Online I found all sorts of information about other people who claimed to see faces. Mostly right when they were falling asleep. But most of what I found talked about weird stuff like astral projection and past lives and something called the Akashic Records, which is like a universal storeroom for all human knowledge that can be accessed during deep meditation. None of this was too helpful, so I basically just went around for years weirded out by it all.

  The mystery was solved only when my father handed me that folder. Inside, remember, were pictures of all of Jeffrey Dahmer’s known victims. Pictures with names.

  I’d looked only at the top sheet. Hadn’t known any of the names.

  Their faces, however . . .

  I’d recognized every one.

  • • •

  So now Richard Guerrero’s face was in the stadium directly across from me.

  One of the few names I’d recently learned, but a face I’d seen more than a dozen times in my life.

  A cotton candy vendor here, a couple of empty blue seats there. Some white shirts, an aisle of concrete steps. A massive collage of colors and shapes forming into a single distinguishable something. Ordinarily I would just look away. Not allow the face to form any more than it already had. But this time I would not (or could not) look away. I saw everything.

  The long thin face and extended chin, the big sad puppy-dog eyes, stuffed lips, the hint of a thin mustache even.

  A memory of mine. A killing memory.

  • • •

  Richard Guerrero was murdered on March 24, 1988. That day, he was given a drink laced with sleeping pills and then strangled. His remains were removed in pieces in the garbage for the next several weeks. This all happened in the house of Catherine Dah
mer. One of three murders there. Eventually Catherine Dahmer got tired of the chemical smells and the noises from her basement and she kicked her grandson, Jeffrey, out of her house.

  • • •

  Castillo asked where I was going. I’d lurched up from my chair. I was stammering back some sort of reply. Who knows what I said, but I finally claimed to need to go to the bathroom. Castillo eyed me suspiciously per usual. There was sweat on my forehead, trickling down my back. I think my whole body was shaking. But he nodded. Told me to hurry up.

  There was no one sitting next to either one of us, so it was pretty easy to get up and out to the steps and down to the bathrooms. I didn’t really need to go, of course, but I sure needed to change the scenery. I knew I hadn’t killed Richard Guerrero. He’d been dead twenty years before I’d been born. And yet . . . I had killed Richard Guerrero.

  The skin and bones and hair and heart I was walking around Harrisburg with were the exact same that had been in that Milwaukee room in 1988. Like one of those Russian nesting dolls that you keep opening up and finding another smaller one just like it within. That was me, a “smaller” Jeffrey Dahmer. I could not deny this, as much as I tried while shuffling, half-dazed, to the nearest bathroom.

  I tried peeing just for something to do, but it took, like, five minutes for a couple of drops. I washed my hands and caught myself staring at the mirror again. I reset my glasses, studied my own face like I was looking at it for the very first time.

  The last face Richard Guerrero had ever seen.

  I guess it was only fair I had to look at his face now.

  Marvelous night for baseball, a deep voice said beside me.

  I turned. Fully expected to find Richard Guerrero standing there. His swollen neck bruised all purple and black. Or even a woman in a black dress. Why not? I was fully prepared to go downright insane at this point. Embrace it, you know?

  Instead at the next sink was a black man who nodded hello to me. Not a hallucination. About my size, gold rounded glasses, a slender goatee, and a shaved head beneath a red Senators baseball cap. He wore a burgundy silk suit, a pair of large Chinese-style goldfish embroidered in crimson across his button-down shirt.