Project Cain (8 page)

Castillo said he didn’t really understand it himself yet either. Only that this was all in my father’s journals. The ones I’d been unwilling to read that Castillo had now pored over for almost two straight days. And in these journals my dad apparently wrote there was some kind of connection between him and this Tumblety guy. Karmic, cosmic. Genetic. Related by blood, probably. And, according to Castillo, my father’d been writing about this stuff for years. Even before I’d been born/made.

Castillo asked if my dad had ever said anything to me about any of this. About Tumblety and all. He hadn’t. But I totally remembered seeing Tumblety’s name in my father’s secret office the one time I’d gone in. Castillo then asked if my dad had ever talked about Jack the Ripper.
He hadn’t. I kept searching my memories for something—anything.

Castillo handed me his phone and told me he had some more pages from the journals he wanted me to read. Some things my father had apparently written about all of this. About Tumblety and the Ripper and all. Castillo hoped maybe something would trigger an idea or memory, some hint as to what my dad might be up to, or, even, where he might be.

Castillo’s next sentence trailed off.

He wanted to warn me. Warn me about what I was about to see. That all the squiggles and chickens and old corpses were only the start. He was looking for the right words to capture the fact that my father was—based on the evidence in the journals—completely insane. And I couldn’t blame Castillo for that. Because my own mind was searching for those exact same words.

He asked me to read only as much as I could.

I did not get very far.

•  •  •

I will spare you the exact details of what I did read.

The short of it is:

(a) My father had a troubled childhood plagued by nightmares that developed into an abnormal relationship with women in general. (b) The nightmares were primarily focused on a specific dead woman. He did not recognize her. And whether she was a suppressed memory of some kind or totally imagined didn’t matter. As the years went on, her draw on him became greater and greater. It became, even, some form of love. (c) He called this woman the THING ON THE BED. (d) One day, while reading a book about Jack the Ripper, he saw a picture of one of the victims, a horrible picture from more than a hundred
years ago. (e) My father recognized her instantly, and everything, his whole life, suddenly made sense. This THING ON THE BED was simply some genetic memory passed down to him through inheritance (just like blue eyes or small feet) from his ancestor Jack the Ripper.

•  •  •

The government now has these journals.

•  •  •

I’d stopped reading. The words on the screen were blurry anyway.

Exhaustion. Tears.

I handed Castillo his phone back. Told him nothing had really jumped out at me.

He just kinda stared at me. Told me to get some rest or put on the TV if I wanted. I didn’t know what else to do, so I took it as an order more than anything else. I couldn’t tell you what I watched that night. It was just an hour of lights and colors flickering on the screen at this point, the sound little more than white noise.

All the while, Castillo just kept working at that desk. Looking stuff up. Gathering information. I don’t know. I didn’t want to ask. (He always looked so angry then, you know?)

It was the first time I could really watch him up close without him looking back, and I finally got a good look at all his scars. They ran all up and down both his arms. Deep pink-white scratches. Almost like tattoos. I didn’t have the guts to ask.

Later, I’d see all the others.

Eventually he looked over and caught me staring at him. He asked what I wanted. He looked like he wanted to punch me in the face or something. I got this impression a lot from Castillo at the start.

I asked if there was anything else I could do to help.

He said: Is there?

We both knew the same thing.

There wasn’t.

Every assignment he’d already given me (my dad’s doodles, the mall, looking through my dad’s journals) had led to nothing. Just my saying NO a lot and us not finding anyone.

So he looked at me like I was a piece of crap again, and I sat there stupid for a long while and then just rolled over to maybe get some sleep.

I couldn’t even do that.

•  •  •

But I kept my eyes closed and pretended to sleep. I was so very tired. Couldn’t believe I wasn’t just passing out immediately. But I kept thinking so much about my dad. And I tried
not
thinking so much about my dad. And it wasn’t easy. It’s like trying not to think about a PURPLE COW. Go ahead, try. Once it’s in there, it’s in there. And all these notions of my dad, over what his life had been and was. And these personal demons he’d been carrying around all those years. It was clear I didn’t really know the guy. What he was truly capable of. I needed . . . I needed to think about something else. Get this particular purple cow out of my brain awhile.

So I thought about my mother.

Both of them.

•  •  •

The first one in the pictures.

The one who was supposed to have died in a car crash of some kind. Her face, which I’d known so well a day before, was already becoming a
blur to me. Like my mind knew to just write her off as complete make-believe. I wondered who the blond boy with her in the one picture was. If it was really me. Or just some random blond kid. Were even the pictures of ME fake? Where had my father found her? Had they really been married? Was she just a model/actress they’d picked out to play a part? How much had they paid her to be my mom for three photos? How much was such a thing worth? I pursued a formless memory of visiting her grave. Bringing flowers to her grave. I envisioned my father standing over me. Cool wind in dark lonely trees above both of us. Had I invented this memory? Or had it been given to me? Had my father simply TOLD me we’d done this, and I’d processed it into my memories with so many other lies? Worse, had he maybe taken me to some random grave and said Say Good-bye to Your Mother? All those years I’d fought to remember anything and everything about her. And I’d fought the guilt of failing at that one simple thing. Her face slipping away from me like a dandelion ball drifting farther and farther out of reach. Memories of how she’d sounded and the things we’d done together before the accident. Memories that had never been.

And then my thoughts turned to my BIRTH mother.

The woman who’d only carried me for a few months. From the folder my father had given me, I knew she was from somewhere in Ukraine. I knew she’d been young and that they’d paid her. That’s all I would ever know. How many other babies had she carried? How many other women had done this exact same thing for DSTI? She’d carried me just four months. The rest of the time after that, more than a year, I’d been in some kind of pod. A vat of fluids while they’d grown me to just the right size for Dr. Jacobson. I had no memory of this. And yet, that first night in that motel with Castillo, I could just about make
out the buttery fluid. Warm and salty. Completely surrounding me as I turned, floated, in the room’s darkness. In my mind, I lifted my hands. Slowly opened my eyes in the thick fluid.

The hands I was seeing weren’t mine, however.

They were dark. Or gray, maybe. Long and gnarled.

Hands with claws.

And suddenly I couldn’t even quite make out which direction they were facing. Meaning, if they were MY monstrous hands and I’d turned them to study the palms or they were some OTHER hands pressed against the glass. The hands pressed—

I startled fully awake.

It’d been a dream, maybe, or some half-formed memory.

I didn’t know then. (Later, I would realize it had been a little bit of both.)

The room was half-dark. Castillo had turned off the TV and worked only with the small desk lamp and the light from his two laptops. I didn’t know what time it was. If I’d slept all night or just a few minutes. I watched this guy work for a minute and stared, blurry-eyed, at that dim light. God only knew what he was looking for or at. So I closed my eyes again to the constant tapping of the two keyboards. Like rain almost, or maybe thousand-legged bugs running around in the walls.

As I drifted off again, I was—despite all my previous efforts—only, you guessed it, wondering again what my father was doing. And maybe “wondering” isn’t the best word.

Maybe the better word is “fearing.”

I
awoke next to the sound of Castillo’s deep voice talking on the phone. Couldn’t get much out of what he was saying. Something about money and monsters and some guy named Pete.

Any hope I’d had of waking up to discover the previous forty-eight hours had been “all just a dream” ended right then and forever. It was real—all of it—and I woke as confused as I’d ever been.

I pretended to remain asleep and stayed just like that until he left the room. When the door shut, I sat up and looked around.

Castillo’d taped a map up onto one of the walls, and I climbed out of bed to look at it. He’d made little marks all over it. Black dots and blue and red dots, with names and dates beside each. They were all over the whole country.

I moved slowly about the room. The desk was covered in notes he’d taken. He’d closed his two laptops. I ran my fingers across each and snuck a look at the written notes he’d left, but it was just more names and dates. Scribbles no better than the ones my dad had left. Besides, I didn’t want to look too closely. Castillo could come back into the room at any second.

His lone duffel bag was closed. I imagined what might be inside this black canvas treasure chest. Spy stuff of some kind, right? Special cameras and recording equipment. Secret truth serums, poisons, and whatnot. Or just maybe more evidence he hadn’t yet shown me.

I wondered if he’d left any of his guns in the room. In the bag.

Maybe, to tell the truth, I even wondered some what I would do if I found one.

I cautiously eased down into the chair he’d used all night and just looked about the room again. Pressed my fingers against the table. Then I spun the chair to look at my side of the room. I tried visualizing what he was seeing whenever he looked over my way. The worthless little kid sniveling in the corner. The clone monster watching TV, taking a nap, as if nothing had happened. As if he weren’t some monster.

I looked away.

Couldn’t even imagine looking at myself.

•  •  •

I was standing at the map again when he came back into the room.

He seemed tense. Surprised to find me awake, I guess.

I think the guy might even have actually reached for a gun or something behind his back.

Since I’d been busted, I just started yapping. I quickly asked about the map. The dots.

Anything to make the whole scene a little less awkward.

He told me the map was to keep track of DEAD PEOPLE.

He called it the MURDER MAP.

•  •  •

The red dots were murders.

The black ones were disappearances. Blue was rape.

Castillo told me they were all the crimes that’d been reported in the last twenty-four hours.

One single day.

I looked at the map again.

There were sixty dots all over the country.

Most were red.

•  •  •

I turned and said that was impossible. I mean, there was no way that many people—

He looked at me like I was stupid.

Told me that in the US at least forty people are murdered every single day.

I did the math in my head.

That was about three hundred people a week. Fourteen thousand a year. Every year.

Half go unsolved, he said. And those were the ones he was interested in. Because maybe/probably these six students hadn’t finished killing yet.

I’d found Radnor, Pennsylvania, on the map. The town where DSTI and the Massey Institute are. Castillo hadn’t placed any dots there, but I imagined them all the same. Twelve red ones all piled on top of each other.

I asked Castillo if he really thought those six guys had something to do with the . . . with the murders at Massey. White lumps came to mind. Red dots covered with white sheets.

Castillo assured me that that’s definitely what it looked like.

And do you really think my dad helped them?

I did not ask this out loud. I was afraid of his answer.

So instead I just asked WHY. Why would anyone do something like that?

Castillo said he didn’t know. Said these aren’t—

But he stopped himself from finishing the thought/sentence.

Aren’t what? I pressed. Aren’t “normal people” is what he’d meant to say.

He looked away.

Then I got curious and asked HOW they’d done it. How specifically they’d killed at Massey.

Castillo asked if that mattered.

Did it?
I wondered. I said: Maybe.

He nodded. Agreed it might.

Some had been bludgeoned, beaten, to death. Some had been strangled. Some cut. Two boys, clones of the two kids who’d shot up Columbine High School, had been, Castillo said, “skinned alive.” I wasn’t entirely sure what this meant. Two of the victims had been women. The first had been raped before she was killed. The other woman, a Language Arts teacher named Gallagher, whom I’d met, had apparently been gutted in my father’s office.