Castle: A Novel

by J. Robert Lennon

  I was puzzled by his words. But if he believed that my confusion would throw me off my guard, he was sadly mistaken.

  He lunged. At the same moment, I released the arrow. Belatedly I realized that he had not been attempting to evade my shot. Instead, he had thrown himself off the rock. His leap took him high into the air, and it was at the zenith of that leap that the arrow met him. It was a perfect shot, striking him in the back, low between the shoulder blades and slightly to the left. And as the arrow passed through him, he vanished from view.

  I listened for his cry. But there was none. For a moment, the silence seemed to deepen, the stillness to take on weight. And then, from behind me, I heard a rumble, and the light dimmed. I turned. A cloud was moving across the face of the moon. Before I could wonder why it had brought no wind, the wind came, curling around the summit and raising, briefly, a vortex of dust and dead moss before gusting in earnest, pressing my clothes against my body and blowing leaves and pine needles against my neck.

  A storm was coming, and I had to climb down before the rain began. But first I ran to the northern lip, lay on my stomach, and looked down over the edge. It was no use—with the moonlight now occluded by clouds, and the rock’s blurry shadow extending to the woods, the clearing was lost in murk. I could see nothing.

  I scrambled to the southern edge and began my descent, with the wind alternately pressing me to the cliffside and straining to pluck me away. How had I failed to notice the approaching storm? I was barely a third of the way down when I felt the first drops on my cheek, and then, seconds later, the sky opened up and lashed the cliffside in a fusillade of raindrops. Immediately the rock face became slick and unnavigable. One of my feet slipped, then a hand, and I nearly fell.

  Instead, I managed to find a lower hold, and then one lower than that. Several times I lost my grip and slid the length of my body; once I fell entirely and only avoided serious injury or death by grabbing hold of the ledge I had rested on during my first ascent, days before. At last I arrived, bruised, scraped, and soaking wet, at the lone pine, where I grabbed my pack and made a run for the “toe,” limping and bleeding as I went. The wind howled and the rain fell in sheets, and I almost slipped again as I lowered myself to the firm ground of the clearing.

  I might have gone for the cover of the trees. But I had to reassure myself, first, that the Doctor was really dead. By keeping close to the western face of the rock, I was able to avoid the worst of the storm, and soon I had arrived at the northern end, beneath the cliff he had leaped from.

  He was there. He lay curled in the lee of the rock, his head thrown back, one arm flung over his shoulder. His arrow was lodged deep in his back, and I had no doubt that it had pierced his heart.

  This is not something I say lightly, but the first things I felt upon finding the Doctor’s body were horror and revulsion. I have had the misfortune of seeing many corpses in my lifetime, and have been witness to all manner of misery and brutality, and never have I lost my sense of sadness and injustice in the face of such things. But something about Avery Stiles’s lifeless form, its crumpled brokenness, its stark corporeality, filled me with disgust and fear. I trembled, and struggled to calm my rising gorge.

  I had never seen my parents’ bodies. Evidently, their faces had been disfigured by the violence that ended their lives, and their caskets remained closed. Gazing at what had once been my mentor, I wondered if my doubts about my parents’ deaths might have been resolved, had I forced myself to look at their ruined faces. Jill, after all, had identified their corpses. She had had no doubts. Quite suddenly, I experienced a wave of guilt, for having allowed this rift to open between us. Perhaps I had been the unreasonable one all along.

  I knelt beside the dead Doctor and choked back a sob. I had murdered my teacher! Of course I understood that it was his desire I should come to get him, that he had martyred himself, ultimately, for some obscure purpose that would never be known. The rain fell, and I crouched there in the dim, feeling very much as though I had lost, as though I had missed something important that the Doctor hoped to impart with his suicide.

  My contemplation was shattered by a tremendous roll of thunder, which, instead of trailing off into a low rumble, grew in intensity and pitch, until the ground shook and the air was split by a deafening crack. I fell to the ground beside the body, my hands clapped over my ears. The sound seemed to go on for hours, though surely it lasted less than a minute, and when it finally stopped, the light had changed, the moon emerged from behind a cloud, and the air smelled strange—fresher, cleaner, as though a lid had been removed from the world.

  I stood up and took a deep breath. My wounds throbbed, but my head felt clear. I looked down at Stiles’s corpse and felt none of the revulsion I had felt mere moments before. Indeed, it was as though the lightning had broken something in me, some blockage, or wall, beyond which some hard wind was blowing. To be sure, the feeling made me uneasy. But, at the same time, I felt that I could now move forward, that I must move forward. There was nothing for me to do now but to retreat back into the woods and find my way home.

  First, however, I took hold of the Doctor’s body and dragged it to the castle wall. With great effort, I was able to pull it through the hidden entrance and deposit it upon the flagstones. All around me stood the castle, illuminated by moonlight that shone now from underneath the bank of black clouds. It appeared old and ruined, as it had when I saw it, for the first time in many years, only days before. The rain slowed, and thinned to a piercing mist. The chasm that the storm had seemed to open in me yawned wide, and my unease deepened. I exited the courtyard the way I came in. At last I crossed the clearing and plunged back into the woods to find my way home.

  As soon as I passed over the treeline, however, I heard an unfamiliar sound. The wind had died down, yet something was moving overhead, through the woods, in small, frenetic bursts of activity. I froze, and remained still until the sound moved out of range. Slowly then I began to creep forward, into the greater dark of the woods, and almost immediately I was alert to another motion: something in front of me, close to the ground and off to the left. Above the trees, the moon appeared, and a beam of its dully metallic light came to rest on a patch of lichen a few feet ahead; through it passed, quite suddenly, an animal, perhaps a chipmunk or small squirrel.

  In spite of myself, I jumped. I hadn’t noticed such a creature in days—what had happened here? It was as though the storm had awakened the sleeping life of the forest, or, quite possibly, awakened me to it. As I considered, I began to hear the chitter and whirr of insects, and the breaking of branches somewhere deep in the trees, as if some great beast were lumbering about.

  And now I noticed that the air, like the air outside the woods, was different as well. It was less close, less enveloping. It smelled of ozone and pine sap. It was as if the sky had shouldered its way in, and I felt the yawning enormity of the world around me. For the first time since I entered these woods, I felt utterly exposed—to the elements, to the creatures of the trees, to chaos itself.

  I shivered, against the coolness of the air and against my fear, and I hugged myself for warmth. I was hungry, and thirsty; my unease, at this moment, was profound. I turned, intending to go back to the clearing, where at least I could stand in the full light of the moon. But there was nothing behind me, no clearing, and I realized I had been walking, running even, through the trees as I held myself, and I no longer had any idea where I was. I had thought I was facing north—but surely the moon, already past its zenith, would then be on my right? And yet it was behind me, and then, moments later, in front of me, and I began to have trouble remembering in what direction my house lay.

  Slowly I began to feel terror, more than I had ever felt in my life. I closed my eyes, trying to fall back onto my training—focus on the immediate danger, consider my options, take the steps necessary to deliver myself to safety. But instead my trembling increased: first my hands, then my arms, and then my entire body shook uncontrollably, and I fel
l to my knees and drew long, ragged breaths.

  The fact was, there was no clear danger at all. It was everything that I was afraid of. I managed to gather myself, to struggle back to my feet, and then I ran. I ran recklessly and without direction, my weary legs pumping maniacally, at the very limit of their capacity. I felt my bow and arrows tumbling out of my quiver, but kept on: indeed, I threw off the quiver entirely, threw off my pack, and sprinted headlong through the tangled underbrush.

  That I would fall was inevitable, and in fact I anticipated it with eagerness. I wanted nothing more than to stop, for at this moment I believed that, if I continued, I might lose my mind.

  My fall, however, when it came, was not the expected kind. I did not trip over a bramble or root; I did not lose my footing on a tricky rise. I was running, my feet pounding on the forest floor—and then, suddenly, I was running through the air, and falling. Before I understood what was even happening, my face and body struck dirt and I felt something crack deep in my nose. Next I knew, I was lying on the ground, sharp sticks poking into my back, my head screaming, my breath caught in my throat, my back afire with pain. I was at the bottom of a pit—perhaps, though not necessarily, the same one I had fallen into before. And this time, the sticks at the bottom had done their work: I was bleeding, and ribs had surely been broken. When I tried to roll over, I convulsed in agony. I looked up and saw the section of the pit wall I must have struck. I reached up and touched my face, and the pain sent me into a swoon. I passed out.

  When I came to, it was daylight, and sunshine filtered down through the leaves. I heard a slow crunching in the humus above me: the sound of careful footsteps. I tried to right myself, and my body protested, and I fell back. I called out, a wordless cry that sounded like nothing that had ever come out of my mouth before. And then I managed a single word, “Help!”

  A shadow fell across my face: a figure stood on the lip of the pit, peering down at me. I squinted at the silhouette, my eyes still struggling to adjust to the sun.

  “Please,” I said, and my voice was thick with sleep, hoarse and cracked as if by hours of screaming. “Help me.”

  The figure knelt, his hands braced on the edge of the pit. It was a man, I was certain of that now: a rugged man, his face strong, the eyes dark and intense and trained upon me. On his face was no expression at all.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, and when they opened, I recognized the impassive face that hovered before me. It was my own.

  NINETEEN

  I knelt, my hands braced on the edge of the pit. The man inside was curled in a corner, his arms around his knees. The pit was ten feet deep, five by five feet in breadth, and made of cement; I had overseen its construction the year before. The floor sloped down to a central drain covered by a metal grate the size of a coffee can lid.

  We had built the pit as a disposal for liquid waste; there were two more like it here in the yard of the detention center. The soldier who had come to get me was standing ten feet back, next to two others, all three of them holding the M243 squad assault rifles that three months ago I had promised would soon be replaced by more effective weapons. The men were bored, the detainee was weeping, and all of us were very hot. We had put this man out here after an outburst in his cell during a sandstorm the day before, and he hadn’t been given food or water since.

  I took pity on the man and threw down the canteen I had brought for him. The cap was loose and the water began to leak out onto the cement. The detainee grabbed it and greedily drank what was left.

  The solider who had summoned me stood waiting. His name was Fayette, and I must confess to some sympathy for him. He was a beefy young man, a former football player who had put on weight since he was deployed here, in spite of the terrible food; he appeared to squirm inside his uniform in an agony of sweat and discomfort. I approached him purposefully, betraying no emotion. The others stepped away, turning their backs to us.

  “Why did you come to me, soldier?” I asked him.

  “The detainee, sir. He was freaking out.”

  “You said he wanted water.”

  “Yessir,” Fayette said. “He was saying water, sir, the rest he was just talking Arabic.”

  Behind me, in the pit, the detainee resumed crying.

  Fayette and I stared at each other until he turned away. Beyond us, over the wall to the southeast, was Balad Air Base, its control tower visible from where we stood. In the other direction was the runway, and past that lay the barracks of Logistics Support Area Anaconda. All that could be seen from the bottom of the pit, on the other hand, was a square of sky—I knew this because I had climbed down in it, some days before, while assessing it for possible repurposing as an aid to the extraction of intelligence. So far, this tactic was not working well.

  “Get the canteen back from him when he’s done,” I said, and went back inside.

  I was a chief warrant officer in the U.S. Army, a logistics expert charged with overseeing the construction of a new detention center in Iraq for the processing and temporary housing of detainees arrested in connection with terrorism, and with gathering information from those detainees. Our facility had seventy-five units, and was capable of accommodating 150 detainees, but we’d never expected to fill it—rather, it had been designed as a high-value temporary detention site for persons of great importance to U.S. intelligence. When the facility opened, it held several members of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and a number of suspected al-Qaida operatives, spillover from the detention center at Camp Cropper. The facility—which came to be known as Camp Alastor—was medium-sized, with a double-fenced compound anchored by four towers surrounding an impenetrable L-shaped concrete enclosure. I had designed it.

  Our corner of Anaconda was desolate, with only dirt and sand for a half mile in each direction, and no sound but that of wind, and of planes taking off and landing. And for all my pride at my work on the facility, I had expected it to remain a lonely outpost on the edge of the base. Indeed, I’d imagined that within a year’s time after the site’s construction, we would all be redeployed, and the facility would slowly fill up with blown dust. The war, after all, was supposed to be brief.

  Instead, in the summer of 2004, we received a new influx of detainees. We were told they were terrorists, captured by the First Armored and First Cavalry divisions during sweeps of suspect neighborhoods in Baghdad, and we were assigned to keep them isolated from one another, and to begin gathering intelligence from them.

  To be truthful, I was at first quite excited by this development. The initial trickle of detainees had disappointed me somewhat—the Baathists had turned out not to be remotely close to Saddam, and were eventually freed; the purported al-Qaida operatives were mostly street criminals, who had little information to offer, and resigned themselves quickly to imprisonment. I was eager to prove myself as an information specialist, having arrived at my rank through my infrastucture expertise, and I wished to demonstrate to my commanding officers that these areas of endeavor were, in fact, intimately connected—an idea that they had at first resisted. Thus far, I had failed to make much progress, owing to the dearth of subjects; now, unexpectedly, I could put my ideas to the test.

  But things immediately became complicated. In three weeks, we received 280 detainees, far in excess of our capacity. Some of the detainees were very young, as young as thirteen, according to our two reliable translators, who had spoken to them. There were four women, one of them pregnant. According to her documentation, she had been found in a house containing terrorist suspects, some of whom had been killed in combat, and she was to be questioned for information pertaining to their activities. In addition, a rifle had been found in the bedroom where she slept, and so she herself was also under suspicion, in spite of her condition. It was at this time that I began to feel out of my depth, and to worry that I was in danger of losing the firm control of the facility that I had taken such great pride in maintaining.

  Up to this point my military career had been a textbook success, even if my path
to this success had proved unusual. As it happens, I was well prepared for army life by Doctor Stiles and his unorthodox methods of training. This training, unfortunately, had been brought to an abrupt end not long after the terrifying night I spent in the woods; it appeared that my mother had prevailed, having given my father some kind of ultimatum that he could not ignore. But I didn’t forget the Doctor, and when I grew old enough to use public transportation on my own, I took a bus to the college to visit with him. These visits became a regular part of my adolescence, and we carried on long, intense conversations about politics, society, and war.

  Eventually, however, the Doctor disappeared, and along with him my sense of moral direction. My parents’ marriage appeared to be in shambles, and I spent most of my time away from home, taking long walks along the railroad tracks, or camping out in the woods by myself. In time, I moved out, gathering my things into a duffel bag and riding a freight train out of Gerrysburg. I didn’t finish high school, and only later would I earn my equivalency degree through an army program. I wandered around the Midwest for several years, doing manual labor—mostly landscaping—and rarely keeping an address for more than a few months.

  I might have continued on this path for years, for I felt as though my life had lost its direction, if it ever had one; and I spent my days in a state that today would be diagnosed as depression. Then my parents died. I was devastated—not by their absence, which I had grown accustomed to, but by the fragility of their lives, and the banality of their deaths. I feared a similar fate for myself—indeed, in the weeks after their passing, such an outcome seemed inevitable. But soon this fear gave way to frustration: at the meaninglessness of life, at the laziness of my generation, at the way we took America and its accomplishments for granted. While I was drifting along the West Coast, I witnessed a group of youths mocking an army recruiter in a public square, and I muscled through the crowd and impulsively enlisted. The rightness of this gesture invigorated me; it was the most definitive act I had ever performed, and I never looked back.