Castle: A Novel

by J. Robert Lennon

  For all that, however, I never truly felt I understood my father. I do not fully understand him today. There were, however, times when I felt like I was my father, when I could sense his blood flowing through me, his expressions on my face, his anxious, hangdog stance in my bones.

  But now, ironically, he felt very distant. And when I returned to myself from my reverie, and looked around at the gray skies and muddy ground, I could sense my memories draining away, pouring through me like rain off a mossy roof and into the earth. I was no longer sure about where I was standing—perhaps this wasn’t the former site of our house, after all. Perhaps we’d lived closer to the swamp—or maybe farther in the other direction, nearer to Main Street. In any event, it was all mud and weeds now.

  I returned to my car and drove away. And after several false starts, I was able to find the municipal cemetery where I had last seen, and argued with, my sister, before her recent appearance at my house. It was at the edge of town, on a woody rise around which the county highway curved. Unlike the church cemeteries that dotted our town, this one was ill cared for, the grass long and gone to seed, the ground littered with dead branches and trash blown from the road. The headstones leaned, and the graveled paths were cut through by runoff. It took some searching, but I was able to find my parents’ graves. They were not buried together. My mother’s bones lay beneath a willow tree. This is not as idyllic as it sounds, because the tree was old and half dead, having apparently been split decades before by lightning; and just beyond it ran a low, cracked, graffiti-covered cement wall, over which the road could clearly be seen and heard. Her stone was simple, bearing only her name and dates: 1937–1981.

  My father was buried behind the crumbling cinderblock bunker where the groundskeeper, if there even was one anymore, kept his supplies. His grave was marked only by a cement slab, half-buried in the ground. The dates were identical to my mother’s.

  I did eventually discover what was inside the mysterious wooden box. The police found the box standing open on my father’s workbench in the cellar. It was lined with velvet, and bore a depression the precise size and shape of the pistol that killed my parents.

  As I drove back to the hill, rain began to fall in torrents; but by the time I got home and unpacked the car, it had ceased, and the sun emerged. The ice that had covered the trees that morning was gone, melted away in the warm rain. The front that brought the storm was balmy, and by the time I was ready to go outside again, the temperature had risen to nearly sixty degrees.

  It was 2:00 p.m., leaving me time enough before darkness fell to perform an exploratory walk around the edge of my property. I recalled having been hungry before my unanticipated trip to Jefferson Street, but oddly my hunger had passed, and so I left at once, loading a few light provisions in my pack. I wore a thin waterproof jacket, a pair of running shoes, and a baseball cap; a pair of binoculars hung around my neck. It would be an easy walk, as I planned to stick to the roads, searching carefully for any former trail that could lead me to the rock.

  The first leg of the walk was downhill. I left the lot in front of my house and took Lyssa Road in long strides, keeping to the northern edge, my feet crunching in the gravel. I could hear water bubbling in the ditch on the other side. A hawk circled overhead once, twice, three times, then moved on. And once I saw the face of a doe peering out from the trees to the south.

  But mostly I kept my attention on my own property. I was looking for any evidence that a path once existed, some entryway to the interior that I could trace on my upcoming venture. I kept in my mind, as I walked, some sense of the location of the rock, relative to where I stood; and, given my long experience in the area of land use, I believed I had a very good sense of its direction at all times. Every once in a while I peered into the woods, or took a few steps beyond the treeline, but I found nothing on Lyssa Road to suggest there was a clear route. The deadfall, as on the hilltop, was barely penetrable, and I could see patches of wet, glistening marsh in those few places where no branches lay. The storm, no doubt, had made even worse what was already a nearly insurmountable problem.

  I reached the end of Lyssa road quite promptly, and made a left turn onto Minerva. My experience there was more of the same. No paths, and no clear forest floor. I did pass a roadkilled squirrel, its snout dark with blackened blood, lying on the shoulder, and I pushed it into the dirt with my shoe, so that nature could reclaim it more quickly.

  Soon Minerva Road began to climb, and I passed over the creek that cut off the corner of my property and ran underneath the pavement. Thus, it was not long before I arrived at Nemesis Road, which I turned onto with a renewed sense of purpose. The road ran downhill for a time, crossing once again over the creek, and I made my way deliberately to the lowest point, diligently checking for anything remotely resembling a footpath. Once again, there was nothing.

  It wasn’t long before I reached the road’s lowest point, and it was here that I felt despair begin to seep into my body. My legs and back were aching, my head had started in with a gentle pounding, and my mouth was dry. I had foolishly neglected to bring a bottle of water with me, and so couldn’t eat the jerky and trail mix I had packed.

  Worse, the entire endeavor—trying to find the rock—suddenly seemed childish, idiotic even. What, after all, would I do when I got there? Climb up it, yes, but then what? I would stand atop the rock, and look out at the same view my bedroom window offered, except not quite as dramatic. Then I would climb back down and go home. And after that? I would just… live. In solitude, and to no particular end. In that moment, my entire existence seemed utterly futile, and I saw for the first time just how aimless, how pointless, it had become.

  I don’t know where this train of thought would have taken me, had I not then heard a noise from the road before me. It was a vehicle, coming up over the rise, a pickup truck. It coughed and wheezed, as if having to struggle to make it to the top—and then, as it crested the hill, it roared to life and came rolling toward me.

  I moved onto the shoulder to allow it to pass, and then began to trudge up toward the intersection. The truck was about a hundred yards ahead, and picking up speed. And then, without thinking, I stopped.

  For my work, specifically my often tense interactions with other people, I had been compelled to develop a sixth sense. Not an actual sixth sense, of course—rather, a heightened sensitivity to the information I gathered through the five normal senses. A careful observer, I discovered, can learn to predict what another person will say or do; and with practice, one can steer that person’s thoughts and actions in beneficial ways. I don’t know what it was about the driver’s face that alerted me—he appeared in every way to be the typical resident of the area, with a filthy “trucker” style cap shading sallow, thin cheeks and a long drooping mustache—but I was suddenly wary, my muscles tensed.

  And then it happened—just as it was about to pass me, the pickup swerved, barreling straight toward the verge where I stood. I leaped off the road surface and into the trees, where I tripped on the deadfall and crashed to the ground. From behind me I heard tires squeal and gravel spray, and the high, mad cackle of the vile redneck driver. I lay there, my hands scraped, my ribs bruised, and listened as the pickup struggled up to the corner of Nemesis and Minerva. I cursed under my breath, and then louder, and that’s when I heard a twig break, and I looked up, into the forest.

  It was the white deer. It had turned, leaping, at the sound of my voice, and now stopped and looked back. It was perhaps twenty yards off, gazing at me over its shoulder. Slowly I stood, not once taking my eyes from the animal. I brushed myself off, watching it watch me. One minute passed, and another. And then it bounded off to the southwest, stepping through the rotting branches. It turned once more before it disappeared, and I understood that this was a sign—that the deer was showing me a path to the rock.

  Gingerly, I stepped out of the woods. I paced back and forth along the treeline, and after a few minutes found a suitably large stone, which I hauled up ont
o the road surface and placed on the shoulder, as a marker. Doubtless it would still be here tomorrow, but I stared hard at the trees, forcing myself to remember their arrangement, just in case.

  I had my entry point. And indeed, the deadfall here did seem somewhat thinner than elsewhere, and the ground less saturated. I closed my eyes, recalling what I had just witnessed, the white deer hopping, with weightless ease, from one island of ground to the next, and vanishing into the shadows. Tomorrow, I told myself, I would do the same. I would walk down Nemesis Road, find my marker, and follow the deer.

  SIX

  At 7:00 a.m., after a breakfast of bananas, grapefruit, and oatmeal, I stepped out my door and into the pink light of morning. The sun was low and blinding on the far horizon, the sky streaked with high cirrus, and the air, though cold, was heavy with birdsong and the promise of warmth. I descended the porch steps and crunched across the lot, burdened with gear: my backpack bulged with food and water, a rolled-up tent, climbing supplies, and my compass and binoculars. On my feet were a pair of waterproof boots; lashed to my pack were the climbing shoes and helmet the sneering sporting goods clerk had grudgingly sold me. I had slept well, better than I had at any time since my arrival on the hill. I’d risen at dawn and watched the sun rise behind the rock as, tacked beside my window, the child’s castle drawing served as an inspiring symbol of the endless possibility of adventure.

  I marched north on Phoebus Road, retracing, in reverse, my route back from yesterday’s reconnaissance. The pavement, cracked and uneven, was still damp from the rain. I tested my boots by splashing through puddles—though my canvas trousers, tucked in and laced fast, were soon dotted with wet, my feet remained warm and dry. I was alert to the possibility of oncoming traffic, the disturbing encounter with the rusted pickup being fresh in my mind, but my overall mood was one of excitement and confidence. Any passerby, watching my progress along the treeline, would have seen a man who appeared younger than his years, a spring in his step and a sense of purpose in his stride. I leaned forward and, pacing my breaths like a swimmer, plunged forward, as if on a mission of great importance and priceless reward.

  After my turn onto Nemesis, it took less than ten minutes to reach the entry point I had discovered the day before. The marker stone was still in its place, the pattern of tree trunks precisely as I recalled. I lifted the stone and tossed it into the weeds at the roadside. Then I took one last look at the brightening sky and plunged into the woods.

  In spite of the brilliance of the day, and of the trees’ nascent foliage, I was instantly enveloped in gloom. The temperature dropped fifteen degrees, the light winked out, and a sense of unease began to insinuate itself in my mind. After four or five careful steps into the forest, I peered over my shoulder at the world I had just left. I could make it out, of course—the shoulder, the pavement, and the woods on the other side—but already it seemed impossibly distant. Indeed, it was as though I had been cast back in time to the middle of January.

  I suppressed a shiver. My sense of dread was nothing but foolishness. It wasn’t so dark here that my eyes couldn’t adjust; nor was it so cold that my bushwhacking efforts would fail to warm me. Nevertheless, I found myself in the grip of a creeping despair, a premonition of exhaustion and failure.

  This was not the state of mind I was accustomed to, at the outset of an expedition. But one does not fight the battles he wishes to fight; he fights the battles that find him. I would do my best to ignore my foul mood and physical discomfort, and plunge ahead as I had planned.

  The white deer, I recalled, had fled southwest, and so it was in this general direction that I began to move. As before, the going was slow. Branches that appeared sturdy snapped underfoot, plunging my legs deep into mire; clumps of humus that seemed insubstantial harbored heavy stones, sending me sprawling onto the saturated ground. Low-hanging boughs scraped my face, or released a torrent of water as I ducked beneath them, chilling my scalp and neck.

  But I would not be, and was not, deterred. I struggled forward, for hours it seemed, and I did not look back until I felt that I had made sufficient progress. Indeed, when at last I did turn around, there was no sign of the road I had left, and no noise from passing traffic.

  In fact, there was almost no noise at all. The forest had insulated me from the raucous birdsong I heard when I left the house, and whatever creatures the wood concealed were silent.

  By now the sun was likely overhead, but the light that came down through the branches was gray and weak. The trees were tall here, extraordinarily so, and it was difficult to imagine this land ever having been farmed, as the title abstract had suggested. I took a break underneath a towering fir, to catch my breath, get my bearings, and confirm my route to the rock.

  But my mind, in defiance of my aims, grew cloudy and began to wander. I suppose that, given my exertions since I left the road, and my singleness of purpose up to this point, unfocused thoughts were to be expected, and even perhaps welcomed. But I was not used to them and did not wish to indulge them. I have learned that there is nothing more dangerous than a mind that strays from the task at hand. Of course, here there was no immediate danger, and I could not have been said to be working; but old habits die hard, and this was one I had hoped to preserve.

  It was unclear to me whether these muddled thoughts were the result of my uncharacteristic musings upon the past which I had indulged the previous day, or if they indicated a general ailment of which yesterday’s thoughts were also a part. In any event, that indulgence was proving to have been a mistake. I tend to align myself against the present cultural obsession with the past—I am not interested in the ethnic and geographical origins of my family, nor in the circumstances of my parents’ meeting, nor that of their parents, whom anyway I can barely recall. I do not like to reminisce about my own childhood, or remember pleasant moments in my life. I don’t keep journals or photo albums, and in general am not prone to reflection at all. I make my most important decisions according to the facts on the ground, and do not allow the past, or some sentimental interpretation of it, to interfere with my present actions. Furthermore, once I have made a decision, I abandon all resistance to it and act upon it immediately. This process rarely fails to deliver the results I need, and when it doesn’t, the consequences are never worse than those that would have befallen me if I had failed to act at all.

  However, it would be wrong to imply that my visit to my parents’ graves was of no significance. The same instinct that I had long relied upon to accomplish my work had driven me to the cemetery, in defiance of what I thought I was supposed to be doing, and I had to trust that there was some practical purpose, at this juncture in my life, to revisiting the past. Perhaps it was this apparent contradiction in my personal philosophy that was muddling my mind and causing me to feel tired, exhausted even, to a degree far in excess of that which the day’s physical efforts would seem to have justified.

  As I considered these things, I felt my head slump against my shoulder, and all my analytical acumen dissolved. I did not fight the onset of sleep—if my body and mind required it, then I would allow it to come, would even welcome it.

  It was with some considerable disappointment, then, that I found myself waking instantly into the same moment that I had left. Or so it seemed. My muscles did feel somewhat more stiff, and the light appeared to have changed. I blinked, and dragged myself to my feet. My pants were wet from the humusy ground and a pressure exerted itself on my bladder. I relieved myself into a patch of moss, then looked at my watch. It read 9:04. For a moment, I was puzzled—even if I had nodded off only for the barest second, the time was surely past ten. A second glance at the watch revealed the problem: the second hand was not moving.

  Such a misfortune was highly improbable. My watch, a military-grade stainless-steel timepiece with sapphire crystal, waterproof to 200 meters, was nearly indestructible, and I had never once neglected to wind it. I spun the crown, and felt, instead of its familiar mainspring resistance, a sickeningly smooth,
freewheeling rotation. Somehow, in defiance of all logic, the watch was hopelessly broken. I tried to remember what I had done to it since I set out earlier that morning, and came up with nothing. There was no anomalous occurrence that could explain its current state. This was a watch that had had the leg of an oak desk set down upon it, that had been run over by a truck, and here it had ceased working through no greater violence than the swinging of my arm.

  With a sigh, I shouldered my pack and gazed about, taking stock of the situation. I needed several seconds to find the sun through the branches of the conifers that now surrounded me; once I did, I determined that it must be past noon. According to my compass, I had been traveling in the right direction, and now I aligned myself with it and continued on my effortful way.

  After walking—or, to be precise, struggling—for fifteen minutes or so, I began to experience yet another new phenomenon, one to add to my exhaustion and equipment failure. It was, inexplicably, fear. The sun, already dim, had slid behind a cloud, and the gloom of the forest had deepened; the silence that had at first seemed an aid to concentration now merely felt strange, alien. Where were the insects, the animals? The one creature upon which I had come to depend in these woods, the mysterious white deer, was nowhere to be seen, and the trees, in their towering inertness, seemed to be closing in on me. I braced myself against the trunk of one to adjust my sock, which, soaked through in spite of my new boots, had doubled over on itself, and my hand slipped, and I tumbled into the mud.

  It was there, lying on the ground, with a sharp twig digging into my calf and my filthy fingers numb with cold, that I allowed myself to grow angry. A low growl formed deep in my throat, rose to my tongue, and transformed itself into a scream of rage. I leaped to my feet, straightened my pack and hat, and rushed headlong through the thicket, crushing branches beneath my boots. I felt my face flush and sweat break out on my forehead, and my mind seized upon the most recent object of anger that it could find: my sister Jill.