Castle of Sorrows

by Jonathan Janz

  “What if we can’t find it?” Elena asked in a whisper.

  Jessie shined the light directly into her eyes. “You’re the goddamned psychic, why don’t you tell us where it is?”

  Jessie continued to probe the wall, but Ben turned and stared through the dimness at Elena. “Can you find it? Mentally, I mean?”

  She stared blankly at him a moment, then a vestige of rationality seemed to pervade her anguished features. “I don’t know…maybe I can. But it’s so hard to concentrate. I don’t think—”

  “Just do it. Now. Just block everything else out and think.”

  “But it makes me susceptible to them,” Elena said. “What if they…you know, inhabit me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, teeth clenched. “I only know they’re coming. Would you rather die the way Christina did?”

  Elena blanched, then nodded quickly. “Okay,” she said, inhaling. She blew out a long breath. “Okay.” She closed her eyes.

  From the way they’d come, Ben heard the sifting of soil.

  Elena opened her eyes, let out a terrified whimper.

  “Don’t think about it,” Ben ordered. “You can do this. Please, just concentrate.”

  Elena looked nauseated with terror, but she did as she was bidden. She closed her eyes again and began to regulate her breathing. Jessie continued searching for the lever. Ben knew, though he refused to linger on the possibility, that this might indeed be a dead end. If it was, this would be the site of their last stand. Ben’s Ruger was fully loaded, and he assumed Jessie had some rounds left in her Glock. But they weren’t facing human foes any longer, bookies and henchmen. They were facing creatures who’d already passed into the realm of death and, seemingly, damnation. What damage could guns possibly inflict on them?

  Ben returned to the walls and resumed his search. He probed the wall with his fingertips, always keeping Julia secure in the crook of his left arm.

  The sifting sounds intensified, and soon after, Ben heard the shuffling steps of a multitude of creatures. He thought of Eddie Blaze, the monstrous child and burned woman attending him like some unholy nuclear family. He thought of Teddy. Poor, butchered Teddy. Ben had a sudden memory of Teddy’s shocking confession just before his death, and with a titanic effort managed to blot it out of his mind.

  From across the chamber there came numerous stirrings, places where the solid earth had begun to shift and alter. He glanced at the medium, knowing it would do no good to rush her. She’d either locate the lever or she wouldn’t.

  The faces in the walls began to take shape. First came Lee Stanley, then the giant black dog at his side. Another, larger figure materialized—Jim Bullington, Ben saw. Next came Marvin Irvin, the crime lord looking much as he had in life except for the patch of congealed blood on his chest.

  Ben shot a look at Elena, realized the medium was swaying on her feet. He went to her, was about to throw an arm around her, when Jessie gasped and said, “Here!”

  Ben turned just in time to see Jessie yanking something down, a low-pitched scraping noise suddenly filling the chamber. As Ben watched, amazed, the wall before Jessie started to descend—a giant subterranean elevator, at least twenty feet across. He could see why they’d missed the lever. It was nearly flush with the earthen wall and looked just like another ridge of dirt.

  “Get up here!” she shouted, and now Ben did drag Elena toward the gigantic elevator. Behind them the footfalls and sifting sounds had become a dull roar. He didn’t know where the beast was, but he had no doubt it would be here soon. The elevator had lowered to chest level now, and through the light of Jessie’s beam he discovered this was indeed the pit. If they could only beat the dead things behind them to the door above, they might yet live to make a run for the boat.

  “Get up, get up!” Jessie urged. “I’ll raise the lever before it gets all the way down.”

  Ben nodded, lifted Elena one-armed and practically hurled her onto the pit floor, which was level with Ben’s waist now.

  “Raise the lever!” Ben shouted. “I’ll pull you through!”

  Jessie did, though it cost her an effort. As Ben climbed onto the pit floor he realized he should have handed his baby to Elena and volunteered to push the lever himself, but there just wasn’t time to think.

  Ben was on his knees watching Jessie when the elevator began to rise again. The wall lever was only six feet away, but the elevator was grinding steadily higher now, at a level with Jessie’s shoulders. She dashed over to where Ben knelt, his free arm extended, and had just taken hold of him when her eyes went wide with horror. The flashlight hit the elevator floor and flickered for an instant. But the beam stayed on, and in its weakening yellow glow Ben distinguished the numerous shadows converging on Jessie, the chortling, bloody face of the figure that had grabbed hold of her.

  It was Troy Castillo.

  Ben shielded Julia’s ears as best he could, leaned forward, and placed the Ruger in Castillo’s leering mouth. The dead man’s eyes flicked to Ben, and in that instant Ben had no doubt there was recognition in them. Ben squeezed the trigger. Castillo’s head snapped backward, a gout of ichor splashing the corpses behind him. Jessie leaped upward and threw her arms around Ben’s neck. The pit floor continued its ascent, and for one horrible moment Ben was sure Jessie would be cut in half as the huge elevator passed above the ceiling of the chamber. But the toes of her sneakers slipped through the gap just before it closed. Two of the corpses—Nicky Irvin and Ray Rubio—that had clambered onto the lip of the elevator were sliced in half by the ascending pit floor. Nicky and Rubio bellowed with renewed anguish. By mutual consent, Ben, Jessie and Elena moved away from the flopping, twitching upper bodies of the dead gangsters. Ben decided that if any two men deserved to be killed twice, it was Nicky and Rubio.

  The pit floor continued to rise. Ben had a moment’s fear that the corpses would yank on the lever again and send them right back down to the chamber, but at last the pit floor jolted to a halt, and Ben made out a faint glimmer of light near the floor. It was the door to the basement, of course, and Ben remembered with a wicked stab of frustration that the door had been literally bent out of shape. He didn’t think there was a lock on the door, which meant shooting out the knob would do little, if any, good. Jessie had already rushed over there and was now pushing on it, but as Ben suspected, it wouldn’t budge.

  “It’s—” she began.

  “I know,” Ben said. He turned to Elena, ready to hand her his baby, but something in the woman’s face stopped him. She was shivering, sweating, looking like whatever psychic attempts she’d made back there had indeed taxed her a great deal. He didn’t trust her to hold Julia.

  He moved quickly to Jessie. “Take Julia,” he said, “and stand over there.”

  She carried Julia from him, the infant whimpering in protest. Jessie said, “If you couldn’t get the door open before, why do you think—”

  “That was pulling on it,” he said, backing up. “Pushing is a lot different.”

  Ben halted about twenty feet from the door. Jessie clutched Julia in one arm and shone the flashlight with her other hand. Ben knew at any moment the pit floor could descend again. Or worse, the corpses might merely bleed through the concrete beneath them. He had no idea how that could be, nor did he understand how seemingly solid matter could move through earthen walls. All he knew was he wanted the hell out of this castle.

  Ben broke for the door.

  He took six hard strides, lowered his shoulder and launched himself like a missile at the center of the door. He connected—both his shoulder and the side of his head—with the thick wood, and miraculously, the thing crashed open. His deltoid felt as if it had been set aflame, and he was pretty sure he’d gashed his head wide open. But Jessie and Elena were beside him in the doorway, helping him to his feet. Jessie frowned in concern, asked him if he was all right.

  In answer, he gathere
d Julia into his arms and nodded toward the stairs. “Let’s get out of here. Before they follow us.”

  They had just set off up the steps when the low grinding noise began from the pit.

  The corpses had found the lever.

  Ben exchanged a glance with Jessie and they charged up the steps.

  Chapter Four

  They heard it even before they made it out of Castle Blackwood, the insectile whump-whump drone of a helicopter blade. Ben slammed the basement door behind them and barred the door for good measure. Ahead, Jessie was dragging Elena toward the front entrance. Something was seriously wrong with the little Russian woman, but Ben couldn’t dwell on it now. If Gus and his helicopter really had arrived early—if their way off this hellish island really was right outside—they could soon find Elena all the medical and psychological care she required. If Gus was here, all their troubles might be over.

  Jessie tore open the front door, glanced over her shoulder to make sure Ben and Julia were following, then moved onto the front porch trailing Elena after her. Jessie was clutching the medium by the arm, but when they descended the porch and made it onto the castle lawn, she let go and began running toward the sound of the helicopter.

  At nearly the same moment, Ben caught his first glimpse of the whirling rotor. Then Gus’s chopper was rising into view, the overcast day rendering the helicopter’s form a bit ghostly but not obscuring it completely. Jessie turned and smiled at Ben. He saw with amazement that she was laughing, and even more astoundingly, he was laughing, too. They were going to survive this. They were going home. Ben glanced at Elena, who was staring off into the forest, and at first he attributed her troubled expression to whatever had been plaguing her since the tunnels.

  Then two things happened at once.

  One was the recurrence of a memory Ben had only relived in his worst nightmares. Yet now, in the gray light of the day, the memory unspooled in his mind with blazing, horrible clarity.

  It was last summer, the night the second group had arrived on the Sorrows. Ben caught a quick glimpse of Joshua’s face in the helicopter’s side window. Claire, his future wife, was standing ahead of Ben on the castle lawn and smiling back at him and saying that Joshua looked just like him. Then the engine malfunction, the sick plummeting in his guts. The chopper yawing wildly, the runners nearly perpendicular to the castle lawn. The blade whumping like some giant’s overtaxed heartbeat, the helicopter dipping deliriously toward the castle. The rotor thrashing the earth, ripping into the side of the castle, great spumes of dirt flying everywhere as the blades harrowed the wet ground. Then the crash and the smoke and the severed wires spitting evil blue sparks within the mangled hull. The shrieking. The certainty that Joshua was dead. The sight of his ex-wife’s head torn almost completely from her body. The aftermath…

  Ben remembered all of this in an instant. Every detail. He remembered the way the debris had injured Claire, the way it had gouged the flesh of her shoulder and had almost ripped her apart.

  And Jessie was standing precisely where Claire had stood that night.

  Then came the realization that Elena wasn’t merely gazing into the woods like some upright vegetable. She was staring at something she’d noticed. And glancing that way, Ben noticed it too. It was something deep within the forest, something barreling along a ridge just below the level of the lawn, something racing in the direction of the approaching helicopter.

  But Jessie, he realized with that same sick plummeting in his belly, had not spotted it. She was simply gazing up at the approaching chopper, her body tense with excitement and joy.

  So when everything unfolded, she was the last to react.

  Ben watched in paralyzed horror as the chopper swept over the evergreen trees, oblivious of the thing that tracked it from the ground. Ben could even see Gus waving at them as he began his descent toward the landing place on the castle lawn. Gus didn’t glimpse the gigantic, bestial figure as it burst out of the forest behind the chopper, the muscular body moving with an obscene combination of panther-like lopes and human strides. The chopper was still twenty feet off the ground when the beast leapt, its great arms and legs still in terrible motion as it defied gravity and rose implacably toward the hovering runners. Ben had a moment’s hope that the grasping talons would fall shy of the runners, that the beast would land before them and he and Jessie might have an opportunity to riddle it with bullets.

  But the talons did not miss. They snagged the runners easily, the back end of the helicopter plunging with the sudden drag of the beast’s immense weight, and though Gus had flown for many years, Ben couldn’t blame him for forgetting himself at that moment, for turning in his seat to locate the source of the problem rather than taking some sort of action to unseat the beast from the bottom of the chopper. The tail of the helicopter swung toward the castle, the whirling rotor tilting drunkenly. The chopper described an almost graceful diagonal descent toward the lawn. Jessie turned to run just as Claire had run the year before. Ben wished he could help her, but there was Julia squirming against his chest, almost as though the infant could sense the disaster about to take place.

  And then it did. The blade hit a moment before the tail, and as a result the helicopter furrowed the ground like a crazed rototiller for a full second before the back end plowed into the tall grass and sent the whole thing rising for an instant like a stone skipped on water. Then it slammed to the earth with merciless force. Dirt was catapulted several stories high, the groaning, whumping rotor finally giving way and launching shards of mangled steel spinning toward the castle façade, into the woods, toward where they lay huddled on the ground. Ben heard something directly to his left cleave the earth with a mechanical burring sound. He felt some large object slash the air just over his head, and careful not to crush Julia, who lay beneath him on the wet grass, Ben pushed them both lower. The clatter and clash of metal continued as the chopper broke up, now bouncing and writhing in its death throes. He smelled ozone, caught an acrid whiff of smoke, glimpsed a flash of bright light from within the cockpit. Then there came a quick suck of air and a whining explosion. A withering wave of heat burned over them, singeing the hair on Ben’s forearms. Julia cried out, a sound scarcely audible beneath the maelstrom. Ben realized it had begun to rain more intensely, and with this observation came the knowledge that the chopper had finally ceased struggling. There was a sparking fire within the wrecked hull, a spreading fog of smoke. But the worst, he was sure, had passed.

  He raised his head, saw to his surprise that Elena had survived. Despite her weird fugue state, she had still possessed the presence of mind to take cover before the crash. Ben swiveled his head with a sense of foreboding, positive Jessie had perished in the storm of debris.

  He spotted her thirty feet away, far too near the accident to have survived. Yet she was climbing to her feet, seemingly unscathed. Ben laughed breathlessly, unable to believe it. He cradled Julia, began to rise. But at that moment a dark figure materialized within the curtain of smoke, its shoulders twice as wide as a powerful man’s, its horns curled and tapered at the tips. It stalked toward them on immense, muscled legs, the haunches furry and a deep brown.

  Its pupilless eyes glared at them in triumph.

  “Jessie, look out!” Ben cried.

  Behind Jessie, the beast reached down, scooped up something long and thin.

  A fragment of helicopter blade at least six feet long.

  Jessie just had time to turn as the beast reared back and whipped the blade at her, the twisted metal still lethally sharp. The blade spun once, twice, then tore into Jessie at the waistline. The blade sliced her in half, a brilliant spray of blood mushrooming out of her and then blending with the torrential rain, both halves of her body thumping down on the sodden grass, her eyes staring in sightless horror at Castle Blackwood.

  Ben’s eyes fixed on the beast.

  The beast was grinning at him.

  At
that moment only one thing prevented Ben from charging at the beast and starting a battle that would likely end in his own death.

  His daughter.

  “Ben?” Elena whispered.

  “Run,” he said. He started toward her, saw the beast striding in their direction. Julia clutched tightly against his chest, Ben broke into a sprint. “Now!” he shouted.

  Elena’s trance broke. He caught up to her at the edge of the lawn and led her toward the path down which he and Teddy had run earlier, the path that would lead them to Marvin Irvin’s boat. Even with Julia in his arms, he was faster than Elena. But she was doing her best to keep up, only falling behind a little bit. Running this fast he estimated it would be five minutes or so to the boat. They might make it.

  Elena let out a strangled cry.

  Ben turned and saw a dark shape closing the distance behind her.

  The beast would catch her in moments.

  Then it catches her! an ignoble voice in him cried. The beast will be too occupied with her to stop you and Julia. You’ll get away.

  But it wasn’t right, and no amount of rationalizing could make it right. Yes, letting the beast have Elena might increase Julia’s chances of surviving this hell, but it wouldn’t guarantee her safety. And he’d be haunted for the rest of his life with the knowledge he’d let an innocent woman die to save his daughter and, far worse, to save himself.

  But at least you’ll both live.

  Ben was still running, but he’d slackened enough for Elena to catch up. He bared his teeth in an agony of indecision. Against him, Julia moaned and squirmed, as if sensing the beast’s proximity.

  Decide, he told himself. Decide now. It has to be now!