Castle of Sorrows

by Jonathan Janz

  Griffin paused in the act of tightening his rolled-up shirt around Marvin’s shoulder. Those thoughts had been in his mind at the time—thinking of the feds as pigs that deserved to be slaughtered—but the thoughts were not Griffin’s. He’d never thought that way. In fact, when Nicky and Ray had gone insane at Marvin’s house yesterday, butchering the two agents and then that poor woman, Griffin had only harbored hostility toward Nicky and Ray. He’d never thought of feds or policemen or even security guards as anything but normal people, and here he was shooting one right through the belly. And celebrating. He was a…he was a…

  A murderer. The word clarified like a bloated animal rising up from the depths of a sludgy pond.

  No. He bared his teeth, tightened the shirt.

  Marvin gave a little gasp.

  “Sorry,” Griffin muttered.

  “You did good tonight, kid.”

  Griffin looked up in surprise. He hadn’t realized Marvin was watching him.

  “I’m gonna get that bitch,” Marvin went on. “The one killed Nicky. I’m gonna do her worse’n anyone’s ever been done. I’m gonna do it slow and nasty and make her turn all sorts of colors.”

  “Let’s get ’em all,” Rubio said from a few feet away. “We shouldn’ta run away. They were off balance.”

  “We didn’t run away, you asshole, we regrouped.” Marvin cringed, placed a hand over the already bloody wrapping. “They don’t know where we are, but we know where they are. They’re down two men.”

  “So are we,” Rubio said. When he saw the stricken look on Marvin’s face, he muttered, “Sorry, boss.”

  Marvin took a moment to collect himself. He said, “We don’t know we’re down two. Bullington might still be alive.”

  “He woulda been here by now,” Rubio said.

  “Not necessarily,” Griffin said. “We never set a rendezvous point. He probably doesn’t know we’re here.”

  “Then why didn’t he help out at the castle?”

  Griffin didn’t have an answer for that.

  Marvin said, “Raymond’s right. We gotta assume Jim’s dead.” Marvin eyed Rubio. “You killed the Mexican, right?”

  Ray grinned. “That spick was a tough son of a bitch. Most wetbacks I know, they strut around and talk shit, but I never met one as tough as that guy.”

  “You got him though, didn’t you,” Griffin said.

  Ray’s mouth spread in a sly grin. “Bet your ass I did.” He appeared to consider. “And you got that fed. That was a good shot, kid.”

  Griffin kept cool, but inside he felt like a boy whose strict father has just given him a rare compliment. But should he be feeling that way? Should he be flattered by Ray Rubio’s approval?

  Or revolted?

  “Ray’s right,” Marvin said. “I wouldn’t have made it out of there if not for you. I gotta be honest, I’d begun to think Ray here and…” His voice grew thick. He cleared his throat, his eyes shining. “…and Nicky were right about you. But all along I suspected there was more. I bet on you, kid, and you pulled through. Consider yourself one of us now. When we get back home, things are gonna be good for you.”

  Griffin smiled. He couldn’t help it. And as much as he hated to admit it, there had been satisfaction in shooting the federal agent, satisfaction in walking right out in the open and taking aim. Man, it’d been just like a movie. He could scarcely believe it was him that had done it. No wonder the guys were impressed.

  It wasn’t you, a faint voice whispered.

  Griffin brushed it off. Of course it was him. Who the hell else would it be? Clint Eastwood? The ghost of Wyatt Earp?

  “We’re gonna need some things,” Marvin said. “Supplies from the boat.”

  Rubio got up, but you could tell it cost him an effort. He’d lost plenty of blood in the fight with the Hispanic bodyguard. “What do we need, boss? More guns?”

  “Guns, yeah, but we’ll need food too. Fresh water.”

  Rubio frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  “We’re not goin’ back to the castle right away. We’ll take a few hours to sort things out. Then we’ll head over there and get the rest of ’em.”

  “You mean kill them all?” Griffin asked.

  “All but Mrs. Blackwood.”

  Rubio shrugged. “I still don’t get why we don’t—”

  “I know you don’t get it, Raymond. That’s why I’m the one makes the decisions.”

  Rubio looked like he was going to press the matter, but Marvin sat up, waved him over. Rubio stepped over to kneel beside Marvin. The moment the big man was next to the crime lord, Marvin clutched a handful of Rubio’s shirt and yanked him closer. “You think anybody wants those bastards dead more than I do?” Marvin asked. He glared into Rubio’s face, and for the first time Griffin saw uncertainty in Rubio’s eyes.

  “Then why wait?” Rubio asked.

  “They killed my boy,” Marvin growled. “They took my Nicky. He was all that mattered to me. This whole operation, all of what I did was so Nicky could take over some day. Once he got through his wild stage.” Marvin drew Rubio closer, so their noses were almost touching. “And those sons of bitches, they took him away from me. They took my boy.”

  Marvin turned to Griffin. “You go to the boat. But be careful. They might be looking for us, and I don’t want you getting shot.”

  “We’ll see them before they see us,” Rubio said.

  “You’re staying here.”

  “Huh?”

  “I can’t risk letting both of you go. Way I feel now, I might pass out any second. I don’t wanna be laying here by myself when those assholes happen by.”

  Rubio made a face, looking like a sulky child. “But why do I gotta play nursemaid?”

  “And if I sent you for the gear, you’d be complainin’ about bein’ made an errand boy. So just do it and shut the fuck up, all right?”

  “What do you want from the boat?” Griffin asked.

  “Remember all those totes I had you stow in the cuddy cabin?”

  Griffin nodded.

  “They were full of food and bottled water. Get ’em. And some guns. As many as you can carry.”

  Minutes later Griffin was picking his way through the forest, moving in the direction he thought the boat was in. He had the same Smith & Wesson Marvin had given him back on the boat, the Smith & Wesson with which he’d shot and killed the federal agent.

  For some reason, the thought made him frown, so to get rid of it, he quickened his pace down the winding trail. He was out of shape, there was no questioning that, but he felt good tonight, as if that other who’d ridden along in his body earlier was still endowing him with extra vitality. His bare chest was slicked with sweat, his hair sticking up in wild, damp tufts. But he felt good. Strapping. That was a word he’d always liked but had never felt applied to him. His mom had always used words like wiry and lanky, but Griffin knew those were just nice ways of saying scrawny. But tonight he felt strapping.

  He heard the creek well before he saw it. It surprised him despite the fact they’d crossed it earlier in the evening. What really surprised him now was the bridge spanning the water. When they’d crossed earlier, they’d merely hopped over the creek, its banks being shallow and close together. But at this point the creek was nearly broad enough to be called a river. It bubbled and undulated under a shaft of slanting moonlight, but the bridge itself was steeped in darkness. Griffin slackened his pace and screwed up his eyes to make sure the boards weren’t rotted through. That would be a hell of a thing, wouldn’t it? To break through the bridge and get stuck down there with a busted leg?

  Griffin put a toe gingerly down on the first plank and tested it. It was soft, but there didn’t seem to be too much give. He put his weight on it, taking care to keep hold of the wooden rail. He’d have grasped both sides of the bridge, but it was a couple feet too wide for that
. He stepped forward again, tested the next plank. This one was fine too. He decided he’d—

  “Griffin,” a throaty voice called.

  Griffin’s legs turned to liquid. The sweat on his skin froze to a sheet of ice.

  The voice had come from under the bridge.

  He forced his legs forward, but he’d only made it a couple more steps when he heard it again, the same throaty speaker calling out his name. The voice was awful, like a swarm of insects forming words in unison. A buzzing, wheedling voice not unlike that of a lifelong smoker in the last stages of throat cancer. It reminded him of…of…

  Oh God no, he thought, and then looked down between the warped wooden slats.

  And saw only turbid water.

  But that wasn’t where he’d heard the voice, was it? It had come from behind him, nestled down on the bank in the bunched darkness, the kind of place where a homeless person would build a fire. Or where a fairy-tale troll would exercise his dominion. The mental image this conjured made him smile. He’d long ago read a book to his little sister, a Dora the Explorer book, the kind where you could lift the flaps. In it there had been a troll under a bridge, a silly, cartoonish troll that had stolen a chocolate egg. It was the reader’s job to help Dora retrieve the missing egg. He remembered how Ashley would make him read that book over and over, and because he could never say no to his little sister, he’d always complied. Griffin snorted laughter, remembering it.

  “Get down here, boy!”

  Griffin threw out an arm to keep from falling. His heart banged in his chest, the fear so powerful he felt as though he’d faint. It wasn’t possible that the voice could be who he thought it was, but he had to know. His whole body a nerveless lump, Griffin leaned out over the railing and craned his long neck down until he could see under the bridge.

  Baleful white eyes stared at him from a hideous black face. “You waitin’ for an invitation?”

  “Holy shit,” Griffin said in a toneless voice. Automatically, he retraced his steps to the beginning of the bridge, continued on around the edge of the railing and stumbled down the embankment. His feet got tangled near the bottom and he landed in the sand at the creek’s edge. He peered up at the figure under the bridge, the face caged by shadows. But the legs…he could see the legs all too well, legs he’d recognize anywhere. They belonged to Eliza Carol Little, formerly Eliza Carol Toomey, only that had been her husband’s last name, and she’d divorced that good-for-nothing long ago.

  Griffin’s mother watched him from under the bridge, and the more he looked at her the more he realized her legs were now her best feature. Those legs used to scare the shit out of him, squiggled with purple varicose veins and gone a sickly yellow hue from the jaundice, but now they were the closest features to normal his mother possessed. Because her face…dear God, her face was a blackened, wrinkled pouch that reminded him of spoiled fruit. If not for the whites of her eyes, he wouldn’t have believed her alive at all.

  Yet she couldn’t be alive. Griffin hadn’t been there for her funeral, but Ashley had somehow tracked him down, had left a message on a recorder: She’s dead now. Not that you care.

  Griffin’s mother gave him a moody glance. “Happy to see me?”

  Griffin swallowed. “Of course I’m glad to see you. But I don’t get…how are you, you know…”

  “Alive?” she asked. “Didn’t I always tell you things have a way of working themselves out?”

  He didn’t respond to that. It was too much like the crap she always used to say.

  “Oh, I forgot,” she said in her wheedling, cancerous voice. “You don’t believe in all that nonsense, do you?”

  It is nonsense, he almost said, but an atavistic fear of her still prohibited speech. He’d never argued with her. Look at his dad. Dad had argued with her, and she’d gotten rid of him. Griffin didn’t want to be gotten rid of. Until he couldn’t stand it anymore. And then he’d left and hadn’t seen her again.

  “Nothing to say to your mother?” she said.

  Griffin observed with a rise of disgust that her hands were blackened too, the skin eaten away in several places to reveal ulcerous red sores.

  “You’re not real,” he said.

  “There you go again. Questioning things that are meant to be.” She made that little clucking sound she’d always made when she was proving a point. Which was bullshit, because she never proved anything. Only used her astrology and her numerology and her absurd faith in superstition and fate to justify her theories.

  He couldn’t take it anymore, the clucking and the superiority and the complete lack of logic. “You’re why I left, you know. I was tired of waiting on things to work themselves out. You always said that, ‘Things will work themselves out,’ but all that really meant was that you were lazy.”

  She twisted her mouth into a nasty sneer. “Why didn’t you take Ashley with you too? That way you’d have stolen everything from me at once.”

  “I would’ve taken Ashley, but she was a member of your dumbass religion.” Griffin smiled. God, it felt good to finally tell her off. “You looked at those stupid astrology magazines and read the horoscopes you thought suited you. Everything that happened was a sign or a good omen, ‘Mars is in Venus rising this month’, or ‘Your minor sign is aligned favorably with Pisces’.”

  “The numbers don’t lie.”

  “They’re just numbers!” He clambered forward in the sand. “Don’t you get it? Not everything has to mean something. Every time I got a new locker combination, you acted like it had some deep significance. Every time we got a new license plate, you acted like it was a turning point. But they’re just numbers, Mom! They’re just numbers!”

  “So why are you working for a bookie?”

  That stopped him.

  “Why were you at that blackjack table the night you met him?” She leaned forward, holding up one rotten banana peel finger. “Better yet, how were you able to kill that man tonight?”

  Griffin licked his lips. “I killed him because I took a chance and did something, which was more than you ever did.”

  She smiled, her horrible black cheeks crinkling. “No, Griffin. You succeeded because two of your five had been slain. You went from an evil number to a powerful number. Haven’t I always told you there’s power in three? There’s courage in three?”

  Griffin buried his hands in his hair, pulled on clumps of it until pain flared. “How can a number mean courage, Mom? It’s just a number.”

  “Every religion from the beginning of time put faith in numbers,” she said in a maddening singsong voice. “Even the Greeks recognized their power.”

  Deep within him, some switch was tripped by her words. “The Greeks,” he murmured.

  “We’ve taken their gods and made of them bedtime stories and children’s movies. Yet there’s still immense power there. Enormous potential.”

  Griffin found he could no longer speak. But he was thinking. Thinking rapidly and with some new, momentous understanding.

  “You know what I’m talking about, boy?” she asked.

  “I think so,” he said.

  “You’ve heard about this island?”

  “Not really. Only the stuff everybody knows.”

  Mother surprised him by reclining further and drawing her legs up so they disappeared from the moon’s glow. “You were pleased tonight in the cave,” she said.

  Griffin squinted at her. It occurred to him that she couldn’t possibly know what had transpired in the cave, not having been there herself. But there was something else bothering him. It seemed her legs had lost their jaundiced hue. The shadows even seemed to mask her thick varicose veins.

  Mother went on. “You liked having your boss proud of you.”

  “Yes,” Griffin said.

  “There is another authority on this island. Far greater than any man.”

  “Far greater,�
�� Griffin said in a soft, inflectionless voice.

  “He wants you to serve him. You’ve served him already, as a matter of fact, and he is well pleased. He reveled in the death of the federal agent. The agent was a bringer of order. His death gives chaos a greater reign.”

  Mother’s voice had grown guttural, like a newborn creature from the sewer trying out its vocal cords and attempting to mimic human speech. Griffin discovered with little surprise that where Mother’s legs had been there were only pale mounds of sand. But the eyes remained, those lucent white orbs in the blanket of darkness beneath the bridge. He leaned uphill, squinting to make out her shape.

  “Will you serve him?” Mother asked.

  Griffin took a step up the hill. “What does he want me to do?”

  “A god needs followers,” she said. “You may not have believed in my ‘rubbish’ as you so meanly called it the day you abandoned us—”

  “Mom—”

  “—but the underlying truths remain the same. A god possesses power, but the more devoted his followers are, the more formidable his power grows.”

  Now the eyes were difficult to make out in the veil of shadow. Only the suggestions of pale orbs remained, and the black, wrinkled mouth scarcely moved at all.

  “Don’t go, Mom, I’m sorry for leaving you and Ashley—”

  “Ashley is dead.”

  Griffin stood rooted to the spot. He wanted to somehow explain her words away. But in his bones he knew they were true.

  “What happened to her?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Mom, I have to—”

  “A man,” his mother said offhandedly. “A man broke her heart and she slit her wrists.”