Project Cain (Project Cain)

by Geoffrey Girard

  • • •

  Tumblety! I almost shouted.

  Castillo wasn’t impressed.

  The dead guy in your dad’s secret room? he asked.

  True. But he was also one of the prime Ripper suspects, mentioned in all three of the books Castillo’d bought for me. And so I explained to Castillo what I’d just read.

  After the Ripper murders, Tumblety escaped to America. The New York City police were always watching him and stuff. Apparently he was a bit of a character. Eventually settled in Rochester and got married twice. First time to Margaret Zilch and the second to . . .

  I checked to see if Castillo was paying attention. He was.

  I said, ALICE JACOBSON.

  Castillo nodded and said: And there it is.

  There was a son. William. William later used his mother’s name because Tumblety was a Jack the Ripper suspect AND had also been arrested for being involved in the Lincoln assassination. “Tumblety” was not a name you wanted to walk around with.

  Castillo asked: So, William is your . . . what? Grandfather?

  Great-grandfather, I replied. Maybe. And not mine. I wasn’t a Jacobson.

  Then your adoptive father’s grandfather? Castillo said.

  Maybe, I agreed again, and suggested we could double check.

  Now I had Castillo’s attention. He asked if this Tumblety guy was really Jack the Ripper.

  I reached for the other book Castillo had picked up and explained to him that most evidence now points to an artist named Walter Sickert. They’ve done DNA analysis and everything. Pretty much case closed.

  Wouldn’t your father know that? Castillo asked.

  I said: Maybe he didn’t really want to know it.

  I mean, if my dad was running around for years thinking he was some kind of descendent of THE Jack the Ripper and that somehow gave him a genetic excuse/reason to have all those violent fantasies and to turn into some kind of killer himself, why ruin that with something such as, say, the Truth?

  So, Castillo said, if he still thinks he’s a direct descendent, some kind of rebirth of Jack the Ripper . . .

  It’s totally in his sick head. I finished Castillo’s thought.

  Yeah, Castillo said.

  Yeah, I echoed. And if he’s wrong about that the whole Tumblety thing . . .

  Castillo now finished mine: Then he’s wrong about a lot of things.

  We both let that sink in for a while.

  • • •

  Why This Possibility (That My Father Was Wrong) Was Important to Me

  By now I’d figured out I’d been raised only as a science experiment. My father had constructed and raised me only to further prove his hypothesis that Nature overwhelms Nurture and that the chromosomal makeup that’d led Jeffrey Dahmer to kill all those people would, despite anything I tried to do to the contrary, eventually lead me to do the same. That the Evil coursing inside me would eventually reveal itself.

  Why This Same Possibility Was Important to Castillo

  My father had run a pretty good game up to this point. He’d sort of gotten out ahead of DSTI—and Castillo. The original Massey clones were free; new secretly adopted clones were free. There were vials of some terrible biotoxin out in the world. And it looked like my father was now murdering people and teasing the authorities about it. I think Castillo was maybe looking for proof that my father wasn’t perfect. That he could mess up. That he was, despite all his planning and brilliance, rather insane.

  • • •

  Castillo suddenly said his own dad had taken off when he was nine.

  Yeah? I prompted.

  Yeah, Castillo said. I hated the son of a bitch for close to twenty years. And the more I tried hating him, the more I became just like him. The way he moved, talked. Things he said. Christ . . . I don’t know. In a couple of years I’ll probably be him.

  A strange silence fell between us again.

  I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking the same thing.

  But I wasn’t worried about becoming my father someday.

  I was worried about becoming Jeffrey Dahmer.

  Becoming, well, ME.

  Guess Castillo was worried about me becoming that also.

  It’s time, Castillo said. Let’s go.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Winter Quarters is a “ghost town” in Utah. Past Colton and down Route 96 to Scofield. Deserted canyon with dusty dirt roads, rotted railroad ties, and the gutted shells of a couple of ancient brick buildings. The biggest structure has only two sides left. Whole place looks like a little kid just randomly plopped some gray LEGOs into the ground.

  A hundred years ago it was a prosperous coal mining town. Then the mine exploded. Every available casket in Utah was shipped to Winter Quarters. It was not enough. Two hundred men died in one day. Burned, buried alive, poisoned by coal dust. The entire town was completely empty ten years later. I looked it up on the Internet. Said the place was seriously haunted: strange lights in the mines, the desperate wails of the dying men and their mourning wives. All that stuff.

  I sat in the car alone as usual while Castillo went down into the canyon to retrieve my father. He’d left just maybe fifteen minutes before. Castillo’s intention was to get down there before my dad even showed up. He’d parked on a dark service road. I was freezing again. My whole body shaking with fever chills even though I had no fever. I dealt with it, just stared out the window. Giant slender trees running along both sides of the road and into the surrounding hills. The sky above was pitch-black, a zillion stars blinking overhead.

  I tried not to think of them as dead people this time.

  Didn’t care much about dead people or ghosts tonight. Any kind.

  Tonight was not about them. Only about finding my dad. Getting ANSWERS.

  Soon Castillo would bring him to the car. (Even though Castillo hated me now for lying about the phone calls. But that didn’t matter either. Castillo would do what he said he would. Make things right. He’d find my dad. Even help him.) Then we would all talk. Figure it all out. Make things better. Maybe even somehow get back to the rest of our lives.

  The cursed dead could wail all they wanted. Tonight was only about the damned souls who were still living. Me and my dad.

  In the dark I saw someone up ahead of the car walking on the dirt road toward me.

  Castillo was already coming back.

  • • •

  I did not yet know that Castillo was still a mile away.

  • • •

  I got out of the car to see what the story was.

  But by the time I got out of the car, “Castillo” was gone. No one there.

  Like I said, I was in no mood for ghost stories this night. No black dresses or dark men with knives either. So I marched right down that gravel road toward where I’d seen something. If it wasn’t Castillo, it was someone.

  Figured I would go check things out. Maybe it was my dad. Maybe I’d be the one who found him, talked him into giving himself up and whatnot. I’d be all: Hey, Castillo. It’s cool, dude. I got my dad right here and everything’s gonna be just fine. Sure.

  I kept walking, and the canyon below finally revealed itself. All the brick ruins and overgrown cart paths and concrete foundations. Half a dozen hills and ravines framing ancient mine openings into the more ancient earth deep below. Most of them blocked with decrepit wood structures and signs of danger. Still the gaping black spaces just behind were even darker than the night. A darkness from hell.

  A darkness formed almost like a curious eye, a mouth forming its first word . . .

  Then, despite my best intentions, all my earlier tough-guy declarations, it became a night of ghosts and dead people after all. Safe to say they were officially running things now.

  • • •

  This “ghost” I saw—the face forming in the landscape below—was Ernie Miller.

  (Dahmer’s eighth victim.)

  This was NOT the Castillo figure I’d seen earlier. I still didn’t real
ize who that’d been.

  No, this was something else.

  And at first I didn’t know it was Ernie. I thought it might be Oliver or Errol.

  While researching Dahmer, I’d studied and memorized ALL their names.

  His victims.

  This face filled up almost the entire canyon. Broad nose, full lips. Definitely a black guy. Then I recognized the unmistakable line of a mustache above his smile. Most of Dahmer’s victims happened to be black, and I’d narrowed this face down to three guys. And please don’t think I’m racist or something for not being able to tell these three men apart, because it was an enormous dark face made of boulders and rotted wood beams and shadows and bushes and piles of hundred-year-old brick. Not exactly the world’s clearest image.

  My first instinct was to simply turn away. What I always did. OK, sure, maybe this genetic memory had snuck into my conscience, but I didn’t have to keep it there. All I had to do was look away, think about something else for a while, and the image would slowly burn off in my memory. I’d tell myself later it was nothing.

  But now I had names to go with these faces. Real names. Real people. This wasn’t some hallucination. This was a human being who’d been broken by my genetic father in every way a human can be broken. How the memory of his face had crossed over with Dahmer’s DNA into mine was a riddle for the scientists. Or maybe a priest.

  In any case, however I was seeing this man, I WAS seeing him. He WAS part of my history. He deserved better than my just turning away.

  And I’d read Castillo’s Odyssey book. I knew how to handle ghosts, right? You don’t run from them. Don’t hide. Or scream. Or attack them.

  You talk to them.

  So I talked . . .

  • • •

  Spoke the words out loud and everything.

  And felt like a total idiot.

  The first time I tried, my voice was so quiet, I barely heard myself. I tried again louder. First thing I asked was WHO ARE YOU? It seemed the polite thing to do. (It’s what Odysseus would have done.) I tried again and asked: What is your name?

  I swear the name ERNIE came into my head. Not spoken. No ghostly whisper on the summer wind or any crap like that. Just a word, a sound, in my head.

  ERNIE.

  My heart was pounding now. The “summer wind” was icy, super-cold. I wanted a jacket or something, curled my arms around myself. I’d read that Ernie Miller had moved from inner-city Chicago to Milwaukee to escape the bad crime rate in Chicago. He’d met Dahmer outside a bookstore a few months later.

  What do you want? I asked.

  Nothing.

  What do you want to tell me? Again, spoken out loud. Talking to an entire canyon. Castillo and my father were probably below, listening to my muted echoes. Laughing their asses off or shaking their heads in embarrassment for me. Right then I got this feeling of hyper-embarrassment. But not my own. This was way more. This was something else entirely. A feeling bordering on anger. Disgust.

  Shame.

  I got the sense that being a victim was no fun. No good.

  All Ernie Miller was was another victim. Number 8.

  I had no clue about his family, talents, plans, occupation, hopes . . . etc.

  Only a few family members and friends got to know this stuff.

  To the rest of the world, he’d become only number 8. September 1990. 1 of 17.

  Let’s just say it was a feeling I could relate to.

  • • •

  I wasn’t sure if this was me talking to myself or if I’d really tapped into some other spirit/memory/soul. Even as I thought this, images formed in my mind . . . images of people. His family, I assumed. And then . . . And then NOTHING.

  Because right at that moment SHE showed up.

  Yeah, her.

  The lady in the black dress. THE THING ON THE BED.

  That bitch.

  • • •

  Where once I’d seen Ernie’s face—getting clearer, and closer, and smaller each passing moment—now was this terrible darkness. Like the sky had just collapsed in exhaustion onto the desolate ground below. Or maybe the mines had barfed out all the blackness they had. Up from the ground or down from the night sky, I didn’t know. I just know that that whole canyon had turned pitch-dark in about two seconds. All the rubble and unkempt trails. The mines.

  Gone. Replaced now by a small gleaming white face in the center surrounded by an outspread black dress. Its ridges and folds from the shadows and ravines. Her dark spreading out, running up the hill toward me.

  But she wasn’t there for me, I told myself.

  She’d come for my father.

  So, this was not my ghost to talk to.

  And I turned and ran.

  • • •

  Back at the car I rested up against the side hood. Catching my breath. Still freezing cold. Kept murmuring my new mantra of: “Extreme for Life, Extreme for Life.” Trying it out to see if it might really stick. Which apparently worked just fine for evil visions because she did NOT follow me up that hill.

  It had little effect, however, as I was about to find out, on real people.

  • • •

  I’d climbed back into the car. Trying to somehow get warm even though it was, like, eighty degrees outside. Trying to enfold myself. Separate myself from the rest of the world for a little while. Closed my eyes.

  Then the side-door window exploded.

  • • •

  Glass went flying everywhere. All over me.

  I jumped up in my seat. Looked around frantically.

  The back window now splintered. Something slamming against it out of the darkness.

  I lunged for the car’s horn. I think I managed to press on it twice before someone grabbed me.

  Hands reaching through the shattered window beside me.

  Pulling me back away from the horn. Yanking me up and out through the side window.

  Shards of glass digging into me as I passed. Ripping into my skin.

  Someone was laughing.

  • • •

  There were three of them.

  I swear I gave a decent fight, considering.

  • • •

  I recognized Ted immediately. He smiled. Hi, Jeff.

  Where was Castillo?

  The second boy was smaller than me, darker, older. He just kept throwing rocks at the car.

  Where was Castillo?

  The third and final kid had kept quiet throughout. Hadn’t laid a hand on me yet.

  He walked up slowly.

  We were just about the same height, but he leaned forward to get right in my face.

  It was like looking at a dark foggy mirror.

  He placed his cold hand on my cheek.

  Hi, he said.

  I’m Jeff, he said.

  • • •

  Then he kinda beat the shit out of me.

  • • •

  You hear his blood. From a mile away, you hear it. Like sobbing. Wet gasps. Panting. Gulps of air. The one who gave you life, the FATHER who must be killed for the SON to assume his proper throne. The others are here too. His other sons. You sense three—no . . . four of them. You are to kill them all also. But not tonight. Tonight is for the Father. Those are the orders. The Father is with the other one, though. The Warrior, the one who shot you two nights ago. You know he has killed before also, but he is different, he does not yet kill for . . . for fun. A minor complication. He will just need to die first. You draw the blade again. You feel the blade slicing across his back. Now the good doctor, the Father, Jacobson. One hand around his throat, lifting him off the ground. The other, the hand with the knife, stabs forward. . . .

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The night my father left, he’d told me I was part of the special 5%.

  That when living conditions become too crowded in any environment, 5% of the population will resort to violence to achieve its goals.

  They’ve done studies with rats. Perfectly calm and nonviolent animals until they’re int
roduced into an environment with limited resources. Limited food, mates, and space. Then 5% of the previously nonviolent rats get medieval. They murder other rats. Rape other rats. Eat other rats. Even though they’d never done any of these things when in small groups or appropriate space. It was just part of their nature to adapt. To survive and thrive in a more challenging environment.

  These are the dominant ones, my father said. The ones meant to rule their world.

  That’s, I guess, who I was with now.

  • • •

  We were in a house. That’s all I knew. But I didn’t even know what state I was in anymore. The last ten hours had been a blur of slaps and punches and being locked in the trunk of some car and simply collapsing in exhaustion. I figure I was in the trunk at least six hours. Maybe more.

  Back at Winter Quarters they’d wrapped duct tape around my ankles and wrists and locked me in the trunk of their car. I could hardly breathe in there. I wanted to puke so bad. I couldn’t believe the smell. (Later I would learn they’d kept and transported the nurse, Stacy Kelsoe, in the trunk for more than a week.) I passed out from the reek, I think. Every so often I came back to consciousness. I remember hearing them come back to the car, could hear their ragged breaths and cursing through the backseat. They were excited. Something had happened. Strange memories and visions trickled into my brain again. Then the car peeled out to muffled laughter, and we were off.

  And I kept wondering what had happened to Castillo. What had happened to my dad?

  Such strange images still in my head. Faded but . . . The rest was only a blur. A nightmare.

  They’d stopped about a mile down from Winter Quarters. To cut my feet. They were looking for my tracking chip. I told them I didn’t have one. They just kept cutting anyway.

  How they found the house hours later, I don’t know. I guess Castillo wasn’t the only one willing to bust into a deserted home. This one was a raging mess, however. It’d probably been condemned. Wires were hanging everywhere. In a lot of the rooms the walls had been half-busted. Torn drywall and exposed moldy studs. Like exposed bone, I thought.

  They dragged me into what had once been a family room, I guess.