Castle by the Sea

by JG Faherty

  Remembering Erika’s sleepwalking episode, Jason looked at Burns. “You check the storeroom, and I’ll look outside for any signs she left the castle.”

  “No.” Burns put a hand out to stop him. “I’ll go outside. I can’t ask you to get soaked. We’ll meet back in the dining room. And bring some towels,” he added to Maria.

  Jason nodded. “Okay.” He waited while Burns opened the door, letting in a violent spray of wet, cold rain, and then pushed it closed as Burns disappeared into the ferocious gale.

  Maria handed him a small lamp, its flame dancing behind glass panels. “There’s no light inside.”

  “Wait here, I’ll be right back,” he said to Erika, and then lifted the latch on the aged wooden door. Lamp held high, he stepped into the storeroom.

  And found himself in hell.

  Jason’s first thought was that the lamp had gone out. There’d been a moment of lightheadedness, a feeling like he’d stood up too fast after bending over. Then it was gone, replaced by a different type of disorientation. Total darkness stretched out in all directions. He brought the lamp down to relight it and saw the flame still burned, but the glow it produced only managed to carve an inch or two from the impenetrable black before giving up.

  “Erika?” He turned around, expecting to see the doorway behind him, Erika and Maria framed by the light from the kitchen.

  There was nothing except more black.

  An unpleasant odor filled his nose as he breathed a combination of dead fish and sulfur.

  “Erika? Maria?” When no one answered, he called their names again. And again. Louder each time, his voice echoing in his ears but not in the endless space around him, as though the immense void were lined in cotton. Fear gripped him, his heart beating faster and faster, fueled by the adrenaline pumping through his body. He wanted to run forward but his last shred of self-control asserted itself and, instead, he walked in a slow, deliberate fashion, his free hand waving back and forth to locate any obstacles.

  He counted ten steps before he stopped. How could he still be inside the storeroom? He’d only taken one or two steps past the door; by now he should be well into the kitchen again.

  Was he? Had something happened, causing the lights to go out? Had Erika and Maria simply left the room to find out why, or to light the lamps again?

  No, that doesn’t make sense. What could blow out all the lamps and candles in a room at the same time? And why would Erika leave him there in the dark? Even if Charles had returned and gusts from the storm had blown out some of the candles, others would still be lit. And Erika wouldn’t have left him alone in the dark.

  He took a deep breath, intending to yell for help, and caught a hint of something new in the polluted air. Something familiar, but not the odors of spoiled seafood that he’d been breathing. A different kind of scent…

  Popcorn. That’s what I smell. Greasy, buttery, fresh popcorn. And sugar, like…cotton candy? Or candy apples? Like at a… fair…?

  Behind him, someone laughed.

  Jason whirled around, his ineffective lamp thrust forward, thoughts of food forgotten in an instant.

  “Who’s there?”

  More laughter—a low, gleeful chuckle. Although there was nothing inherently dangerous to the sound, it still raised the hairs on Jason’s neck. It reminded him of someone about to play a nasty prank on an unsuspecting target.

  “I can hear you.” Jason was about to add “show yourself”, but he realized how stupid that would sound. Obviously, the person taunting him was hiding in the dark on purpose, would make himself known only when he was ready. Showing anger or fear was just adding to the prankster’s sadistic enjoyment.

  More laughter, this time accompanied by something else. A wet, thumping, swishing sound that made Jason think of someone mopping a floor.

  Splash-thump-swish. Splash-thump-swish.

  He swung the lamp around. The sounds seemed to be coming from more than one place, as if…

  There’s more than one thing out there.

  Apprehension gripped Jason’s stomach in a tight fist. There could be a million explanations for what he was hearing, but he was suddenly positive there were things out there in the dark. Things coming toward him.

  But from which direction? He wanted to run, but which way? In the Stygian black, he might end up right in their midst.

  And what were they? The sounds were not loud; in fact, if he’d been breathing heavily or talking he might not have heard them at all. The total darkness made it impossible to tell how far away they were. Six inches? Six miles? Distance would be a big factor in determining size. Was he listening to the footsteps of a giant beast, a dinosaur-sized creature coming at him through some distant swamp, each massive step crushing tall reeds and swamp grass and displacing tons of muck? Or was it simply a handful of frogs hopping across a road a foot away from him?

  Road. That made Jason think to bend down and examine the ground he stood on. It should be wood because both the kitchen and pantry had plank floors. He had to bring the lamp almost to his feet before he could see what he stood on. And when he did, it made no sense. Instead of boards, beneath his feet was a rough, hard-packed dirt surface, littered with rocks and stones of all sizes.

  Nothing moved in the tiny circle of light, for which he was both grateful and not, because while he had an intense aversion to seeing what was thumping and squishing towards him, not seeing it, not knowing what it was, made the terror so much worse.

  He stood up, and found to his surprise he could still make out the features of the ground directly in front of him. Moments later, a thin, pale stripe of light appeared well off into the distance and he recognized what was happening.

  The sun was rising.

  Faster than any dawn he’d ever experienced, the dim stripe expanded, grew upward and to both sides, stretching farther and farther in all directions until the entire sky became visible, and with it the place where he now stood, at the source of the foul, tainted air.

  At the edge of an ocean, although not like any ocean he’d ever seen.

  The surface was flat as a placid lake, with hardly a ripple in sight. Weak, ineffective waves lapped against coarse sand and an assortment of boulders, rocks and stones that littered the beach, which began not five feet from where Jason stood, sand and packed earth mixing along a jagged line of demarcation. Scattered between the rocks were thousands of shattered shells, broken shards of dull gray that looked capable of slicing an unwary bare foot to the bone. Many of them lay well beyond the current waterline, which Jason took as evidence the ocean did rise and recede at some point during the day or night, despite its present state of dormancy.

  After only a few minutes, the sky stopped brightening, creating a monotonous leaden dome that blended into an equally washed-out sea along the distant horizon. The sun refused to make itself known, as if embarrassed by the dismal land below it and deciding to stay hidden behind a blanket of haze.

  Jason turned in a slow circle, trying to get his bearings. His first thought, that he was still on the island, disappeared from possibility when he saw how far the shoreline stretched to his left and right. Behind him, the ground rose sharply to some sort of plateau, the edges of which were partly obscured by rolling, tumbling vapors. The hillside itself was nearly barren, playing host to just a few twisted, brown, woody stalks that appeared to be something between a plant and a tree. All of them looked sickly, as if a lack of exposure to sun and nutrients had drained the essence of life from them.

  A shimmer of light caught Jason’s eye and he looked down again. Glistening streaks of wetness crisscrossed the ground around him, rendered visible by the lightened sky. Each stripe was as wide as his hand. They had the appearance of snail trails, only much larger. The thick, mucous-like substance was already beginning to dry, the mother-of-pearl sheen fading to crusty gray flakes.

  Bending down, Jason touched a finger to one of the tracks, and then quickly pulled it away with a yelp as sudden fire burned his skin. He wiped
the injured digit against his sweater and then watched in horror as the strands of wool disintegrated, leaving a dime-sized hole in the material and a small blister already forming on his fingertip.

  At that moment, his brain made an instant connection.

  Those things I heard in the darkness. They made those tracks.

  An image of giant slugs humping and sliding their way across the rocky ground, each one coated in poisonous, corrosive slime, filled his head. He imagined them moving past him in the dark, their deadly bodies inches from his feet, as they made their way back to the ocean before the daylight arrived.

  He’d been lucky they’d avoided him. Now he had to get as far away from them as possible, which meant putting distance between himself and the murky waters.

  Careful not to touch any of the slime trails, he made his way up the steep grade to the top of the hill, digging his fingers into the crumbling dirt to make it up the last few feet.

  Where he found himself at the edge of an enormous graveyard.

  Swirls of ground fog floated in random patterns between headstones and crypts and more of the deformed, stunted trees, making the depressing landscape even more dark and oppressive. The wet, earthy scent of rotting leaves and mildew joined the rank stench of the ocean, the same smell he remembered from raking leaves in the fall after a heavy rain. He turned in a slow circle, trying to find the ends of the cemetery, but it had none. As far as he could see, crooked rows of grave markers marched on until they, too, blended with the monochrome gray.

  In the endless, bleak landscape, the only color was a single red rose atop a gravestone. The open grave in front of the marker gaped at him like a toothless maw. Mounds of dirt sat to either side, ready to be dropped into the hole, where they would land with muted thumps on top of the waiting casket.

  Jason walked toward the grave, filled with a sick desire to read the name carved into the granite. Each step filled him with dread, because he knew deep down he didn’t want to see whose grave it was, that no matter what name was engraved in the stone, the knowledge of their death would be a terrible thing. And yet he couldn’t help himself, his curiosity overwhelming his instinctive reluctance.

  He reached the open pit and stopped, his eyes cast downward, away from the tombstone and its darkly alluring inscription. But it wasn’t dread that kept him from looking up. It was the grave.

  There’s something in the hole. Something alive.

  How he knew it, he had no idea. There was no doubt, though. He sensed it down there, lurking in the wet earth of the fresh-dug hole, waiting for some unwary fool to lean over and look down.

  I won’t look.

  Jason took two steps back, torn between returning to the moonlike surface of the beach with its unseen creatures or wandering through the cemetery in the hopes of finding a way out before the thing in the pit decided to come after him.

  That was when he heard it—the wet thump-squish he’d experienced down on the beach, the noise in the darkness.

  Only this time it was coming from the pit.

  He turned to run, only to discover the beach and ocean were gone, covered by a wall of fog so thick no details were visible within it. The immense cloud bank towered over the hill he stood on, a massive wall of gray that was visibly advancing toward him at a slow but steady pace. Somewhere deep in the fog a man laughed, the sound of it identical to the sardonic chuckle from the beach. Nothing about it was pleasant. It was the creepy, ecstatic laugh of an insane-asylum inmate as he danced in crooked circles, the manic giggle of a serial killer preparing his latest victim in a stew. And farther in the background, the tinkling notes of a lively musical tune, the melody lost to distance and the muffling effects of the mist. Nevertheless, it was somehow familiar, almost like the happy music of an ice-cream truck in the summer, but not quite the same. Together with the crazed laughter, it created an air of menace that made Jason shiver.

  There was no time to ponder where he’d heard the merry tune before, though, as just then the damp squelching of the unseen beast reached him again. Images of the abnormally large slime trails came to him, along with a fear of what would happen if one of those creatures touched him with its caustic mucous.

  But where could he go? Trying to navigate the cliff in that fog was suicidal. Staying in the cemetery, not much better.

  The first wisps of the encroaching cloud bank touched him with tendrils of icy dampness far more chilling than the ground mists of the cemetery. With them came more of the mad giggling and eerie music.

  Was it a calliope? It disappeared again before he could be sure. Not that it mattered. A gut feeling told him that whatever lurked within the fog was deadlier than the unseen creature in the grave.

  Turning, Jason picked a direction away from the fog and skirting the sinister black hole in the ground. He was already past the grave when something called his name.

  “Jason…”

  He looked over his shoulder.

  A pseudopod of gray snaked out over the edge of the grave, a rubbery limb glistening with slime. Half-formed digits gripped the soil, dug in. Smoke rose where the acid slime met damp earth.

  “Jason…Jason…”

  That voice. Coming from the hole…

  No. It couldn’t be.

  “Erika?”

  “Jason…I miss you. It’s so cold down here… Jason…come join us…Jason…

  “…Jason!”

  Something touched his arm and he screamed.

  “Jason! Are you all right?”

  Jason turned around. A rotted, mangled visage stared at him, and he threw his arms up to shield himself from the creature’s vile claws as it reached for him.

  Then the image faded away and in its place was Erika, her unblemished arm outstretched. Behind her stood Maria, her hands over her mouth.

  He was back in the pantry.

  Instead of gravestones and fog there were only shelves of dry goods and jarred foods. Instead of wet earth, there were warped floorboards beneath his feet. The only odors in the air were the lingering ghosts of Maria’s cooking.

  “What… How…?” His words ran out, leaving him standing there with his mouth open.

  Erika stepped back, her eyes wide and concerned, and then reached out again, more tentatively this time.

  “Jason?” Her hand trembled more than the cold air called for, and it broke a piece of Jason’s heart to know her fear was partly his fault. Despite his lingering confusion, he took both her hands in his, pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her. There was the briefest of hesitations on her part, and then she returned the embrace.

  “I’m okay, babe,” he said, after they released each other. “I… Something happened. I was someplace else.”

  “I thought you had a seizure. The door shut behind you, so we opened it again and you were just standing there. Not moving. The lamp fell out of your hand. I didn’t know what to do. I went to touch you and Maria said not to, that we should let the spell pass. Then you started saying my name and that’s when…”

  “It’s okay.” Jason took her hands again. Erika looked ready to cry, and he could only imagine how she must have felt, seeing him like that.

  Standing still. But in my head, I was running, climbing.

  It didn’t make sense. He’d never had an episode or seizure of any kind before.

  “How long was I out?”

  Erika frowned. “Maybe a minute or two. No more than that.”

  “Two…?” Jason quickly closed his mouth. Two minutes? It had seemed like hours to him!

  First, Erika’s sleepwalking, and now this. Maybe it’s just a reaction to stress. Or to jumping from one time and place to another.

  Hell, maybe Burns is right and this is all just a hallucination. I fell out of that boat in the carnival and cracked my head, and everything since then is just my mind playing tricks on me.

  Thinking of Burns made him remember why they were in the storeroom in the first place. A quick glance around the room was enough to show Lilly wasn�
�t there; the shelves offered no place for an adult to hide, and there was no exit other than the door they’d entered through.

  “Lilly’s not here,” he said, eager to be out of the room. “Let’s check the rest of the house.”

  “Are you sure?” Erika asked. “Maybe you should lie down.”

  “No. I feel fine.” It was true too. Other than a lingering sense of unease from his weird episode, he felt perfectly normal. “I sure could use a cup of coffee, though.” He’d said it more out of habit than anything, but Maria nodded.

  “The professor prefers tea, but we do keep some beans for company. I’ll go grind them and put on a kettle to boil.” She scurried away, leaving Erika and Jason alone outside the storeroom.

  “While she’s doing that, we can look around downstairs.”

  “I still think you should rest. You scared the hell out of me, you know.” She didn’t smile as she said it, which told Jason how worried she’d really been.

  He smiled. “I’m good, I swear. C’mon, let’s go.” He led the way out of the kitchen, eager to put some distance between them and the pantry. He hoped his words comforted her more than they did him.

  Because he couldn’t shake the feeling his brief trance was a prelude of worse things to come.

  Two hours of searching turned up no clues to Lilly’s whereabouts, and by the time everyone met up in the great room, where Maria had coffee, tea and toasted bread waiting for them—and towels for Charles Burns, who’d come back soaked to the skin, with nothing to show for it—Burns’s mood had changed from concerned to angry.

  “I demand to speak with Professor Osvald,” he said, cornering Maria against a table. “Lilly could be outside, freezing to death, or injured somewhere in the castle, while he sits up there locked in his rooms like some kind of hermit.”

  Maria shrank away from Burns’s antagonistic posturing. “I’m sorry, but the professor has said he cannot be disturbed,” the diminutive woman said for the fourth or fifth time, as if repeating the statement would convince Burns to stop insisting.