Castle: A Novel (19 page)

The going ought to have been rough, as it had been ever since the Doctor knocked me out and left me to my own devices. But my feet fell only upon patches of moss, flat stones, and soft humus, and I was moving fast enough to break a sweat. I should have been exhausted, terrified, consumed by anger. I was not. I felt as though the woods were mine—that I knew every twig, every bramble and pebble, every handful of earth, by heart. It was as though I were dreaming.

But if it was a dream, it was the most intense, the most detailed, I had ever experienced. I believed that I possessed spectacular agility, strength, and stamina; that I could have described every footstep in aching detail, could have shown how I turned my ankle, and flexed my toes, the way I fell to earth and landed gently and firmly, and sprang up again to find the next patch of welcoming ground. I did not panic, nor did I fall, or doubt for even a moment the rightness of my direction. As I followed the deer, I became the deer. As I negotiated the woods, I became the woods. As I raced through the night, I was the night.

And then, suddenly, the deer was gone. It stepped behind a tree and never emerged on the other side. I stopped, and my foot came to ground on a sharp twig, which snapped with a deafening crack. Where had it gone? I leaned to one side, then the other, and saw no sign of it. I made my way to the tree—slowly and carefully, as the ground here was suddenly uneven and littered with obstacles—and walked all the way around it, once, then twice.

There was nothing. And for a moment, I felt despair creeping back into my heart, because I thought that I was lost once again.

Then I looked up, and saw the wall.

It was, undoubtedly, the wall of the castle. The deer had led me here, then melted away into the forest. I stepped out of the trees and across the clearing, and slipped into the now-familiar opening between the wall and the rock. In almost total blackness, I felt my way to the wooden block, and pulled it free, and wriggled through the tunnel and into the courtyard.

The clouds had parted and moonlight flooded the castle. The silence was total. I stood on the cool flagstones, panting faintly, waiting to grow calm. The cage, the balance table, all the devices I had trained upon were motionless, yet they seemed filled with grim potential in this eerie light. I was filled with a sense of well-being, a strange confidence and maturity, as if I were safe at home, in my bed, instead of naked and alone under the yawning sky. I blinked, waited another moment, and then moved.

From time to time I had seen Doctor Stiles disappear into the low compound in the corner of the yard, and it was to this doorless opening that I now crept, with as much stealth as I could muster. I stepped over the threshold, alert for signs of life; my eyes grew accustomed to this deeper gloom, and I saw that the room around me was empty. Stone steps extended into the ground before me, and faint light emanated from the stairwell, and the smell of smoke. My fingers brushed the walls as I descended, steadying my tired body. I reached the bottom and walked through the open door.

He lay, wrapped in an army blanket, on the floor beside the dying embers of a small fire. He faced the ceiling and his eyes were closed. Beside him, about three feet away, my clothes were neatly folded in a pile. The room was spacious and low-ceilinged, and contained nothing else but Doctor Avery Stiles, the fire, and my things.

I moved around the room, staying close to the wall until I could reach the clothes. I picked them up, stepped back, and lay them down again, out of the Doctor’s reach. Then I approached him, knelt, and studied his sleeping face.

The Doctor was not a good-looking man. Of course I would not have understood this at the time—I was a child, and had rarely had the opportunity to look closely at anyone, let alone a grown man who wasn’t my father. But his face was distinctive, severe, the cheeks and eyes sunken, the bones sturdy and ghoulishly pronounced. The muscles of his jaw were twitching in the ember-light, as if he were dreaming of something frightening. His neck was long, and rough with beard stubble, and his Adam’s apple, the largest I have ever seen, moved up and down with haunted slowness, like a will-o’-the-wisp.

I became fixated on that Adam’s apple, and the neck that contained it, the tendons taut and long, the throat a dark depression between them, the blood pulsing in the vein. And when my hands moved toward it, it was as though they were someone else’s, and I a passive observer. They were curled like claws, these hands, and crusted over with earth, the fingernails long and filthy, the creases and pores standing out in sharp relief. They were like the hands of an old man, wizened but still strong, and I understood that they meant to murder Doctor Avery Stiles, to choke him in his sleep.

They had that power, I knew. He would struggle, but I would not let go. I would press the life from him, crush his throat, cut off the blood to his brain. (I knew about these things from comic books and films—or thought I knew, as, in retrospect, I am certain I could not possibly have killed Doctor Stiles.) My hands drew closer and closer, and then, when they were about to make contact with his rough flesh, they stopped.

His eyes were open. They were darting back and forth as though following some mad insect as it flew around the room. It took several seconds before I realized that he was still asleep.

Before I could relax, however, his head turned, and those eyes appeared to stare at me, and his face softened, and the eyes went limpid and sad, and tears ran down his cheeks.

“Rachel,” he whispered.

I did not, could not, speak.

“Rachel…” His hands came up, out of the blanket, and found my cheeks; he stroked them, gently, as he cried.

I could stand it no longer; I backed away, disgusted with myself and with his touch. Confusion crumpled his face, and he looked as if he might sob; but instead his eyes fluttered and closed, and his breaths quieted, and lengthened.

I gathered my things and retreated up the stairs. Outside the compound, a rain barrel stood underneath a crude gutter made from a hollowed-out log; I dipped my cupped hands into it and splashed my face with water. Then I put my clothes on, found a suitable flagstone, and curled up there to sleep.

As it happened, Doctor Stiles had made prior arrangements with my parents, or at least my father, for me to stay overnight. From his questions the next day, I gathered that my father had been told I would be learning to make camp, build a fire, and cook my dinner and breakfast. In fact, I had barely slept, had made no camp, and had eaten nothing since he dropped me off the day before. He seemed to sense that there was something wrong, or at least something peculiar—he stole glances at me as he drove, and at one point seemed almost on the verge of speaking. But he didn’t, and we arrived home without any understanding having been reached.

My mother, on the other hand, was more direct, and took me into her arms with desperate relief, studying me as though I had been gone a year: my face, my hands, my arms and hair.

“What happened to you?” she demanded. “What did he do to you?”

I wasn’t certain how to answer. Something about her eyes, their penetrating anger and love, seemed crazy to me. Or more likely, as I was only eleven, I was merely disoriented and frightened. In any event, I had never seen her in this state. She wore her bathrobe, though it was past noon, and her hair, usually tied back into a casual, efficient ponytail or bun at this hour, was sticking out in all directions, as if from an electric charge. She smelled unclean, and her chest heaved with shallow, quick breaths.

“Nothing, Mother,” I said.

“What, then!” she said. “What did you do, all night?”

“We went camping.”

“Are you hurt? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mother.”

She embraced me tighter then, and took me by the shoulders and held me at arms’ length, observing, analyzing. Slowly her desperation receded, only to be supplanted by skepticism and, soon, disappointment.

“You’re not telling me the truth, are you, Eric?” she asked me.

“Yes, I am.”

She frowned, releasing me from her grasp.

“All right, Eric. All right.” She stood up from the chair she had fallen into to study me. “I’m glad you’re home.”

“I’m glad to be home, Mother.”

She had begun to walk away, but now she stopped and, looking over her shoulder, leveled a pained, unhappy gaze at me. She opened her mouth to speak, but, like my father on the ride home, she never did. Instead, she tightened her robe around her waist and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. I watched until she was out of sight.

When I turned, my father was standing by the fireplace gazing at me, an expression of stern approval on his face. And for a moment, I felt great pride at my ability to lie to my mother, and a mixture of pity and condescension for her, for having accepted my lies. I felt respected, and strong. I felt like a man.

EIGHTEEN

I fell in and out of consciousness, only intermittently aware of where I was, or what was happening. My eyes were fixated on a black spot somewhere in the distance, around which something, some lesser darkness, flowed. I strained in the dim silver light to see the spot more clearly, and as I came to, it resolved itself into a knot in a broad plank, the lines of current around it no more than the grain of the wood. I blinked. My senses returned, slowly. Deep aches uncurled in my shoulders and knees, and I was cold. I remembered now where I was: suspended in a wooden cage, my limbs bound by rusted iron shackles and chains. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet. The rank scent of my unwashed body was sharp in my nose, and my mouth was dry and sticky and tasted of mud.

As I endured this moment of vulnerability, the courtyard began to fill up with memories: the tests of balance and concentration I faced on the tipping board; the feats of agility and strength I was asked to perform; the marathon sessions of stillness and stealth, such as the time I was made to perch in a tree for six hours without moving, or hide in a dark room all day, or hang from a branch, or crouch in the brush. I remembered now the Doctor’s strange demand that I give up my possessions, the things I valued the most: my G.I. Joe, and mushroom book, and canteen. The treasure map. The toy train he himself had given me, the day we met. A warrior, the Doctor once said, must be able to survive without the comfort of material possessions. He must require nothing but his muscles and his wits to defeat his enemy. Everything else—home, family, love, sex—was burden.

And now it occurred to me, at last, where the box of bones had come from: an ongoing experiment in which I was taught to inflict pain—in this case, upon a squirrel that the Doctor had caught and caged, and that I was charged with torturing over a period of weeks. As I hung there, between numbness and agony, between wakefulness and sleep, I remembered.

It was a common gray squirrel, presumably caught outside the barren woods, fat with the bounty of summer, cowering in a corner of its cage, its small eyes staring, its tail twitching. The Doctor set it before me on the crude dining table in the courtyard, and explained the aim of the project: to hurt it as much as possible, for as long as possible, without killing it.

I had, of course, no interest in harming this animal—indeed, the prospect disgusted me. As though reading my mind, Doctor Stiles nodded in apparent sympathy and placed a bony hand on my shoulder.

“Eric,” he said, “you will have to free yourself of all personal sentiment. A day will come when misplaced empathy could lead, I’m afraid, to your death. In what we think of as the civilized world—a world, I must inform you, Eric, that is soon to collapse into chaos and lawlessness—it is a virtue to do no harm. In the world to come, it will be a skill as valuable to you as the ability to start a fire, or build a shelter. Throw away your human regard for this animal, Eric. It is an impediment to our goals.

“Now,” the Doctor went on, “if you wished to inflict pain without doing permanent harm, how might you go about it?”

I gazed at the squirrel dolefully, my legs and arms turning to rubber. I wanted to go home. “I… I don’t know, sir.”

The Doctor shook his head. “Think, Eric.”

I understood that I would not be given another chance before I myself became the one to experience pain. “Its… tail,” I blurted. “Sir.”

“What about its tail?”

“We could… cut it off, sir.”

From a sheath on his belt the Doctor pulled his bowie knife, which earlier I had watched him whet against a stone to a deadly sharpness. He now held it out to me. “
You,
Eric,” he said.

I suppose I should be expected to say that I felt something awful when I crossed this line—that this first experience of doing intentional harm to another creature powerfully impressed me as the deep, terrible transgression that it was. But that’s not what it was like. The Doctor helped me to hold the squirrel down on the table, and I raised the knife and chopped off its tail; the animal squealed and bled. We put it back into its cage, and watched as it continued to cower. Without a doubt, I was saddened by what I had done, and faintly disgusted by the results. But I overcame my disgust very quickly, and put it behind me, and moved on. And with every passing day, the torture of the squirrel became less and less offensive to my sensibilities, and I was able to do it with great efficiency and skill, and without any apparent negative psychological effects. I remember being surprised to learn what I could become accustomed to—perhaps I was, after all, a born warrior.

The squirrel endured a great number of injuries in the next few weeks, losing several limbs and its eyes and ears before at last refusing all nourishment and succumbing to starvation. At this time the animal was skinned and its carcass buried; and a few weeks later, when we dug them up, we found that the bones had been picked clean by insects and bacteria. We allowed them to bleach in the sun for several days, and then I was permitted to take them home. I kept them in my cigar box, with some birds’ bones I had found, and my cicada shell, and my map. It wasn’t until the following summer, when the Doctor and I began to experiment with larger game, that I was forced to give up the box. By this time, however, the sacrifice of worldly goods had become routine, and I handed the box over without the slightest hesitation. I knew that the lessons I had learned from its contents would be with me always.

It was my memory of that younger, newly emboldened version of myself that brought me back to my senses, and focused my mind on the problem of escaping from the wooden cage. The cage was, of course, made of wood, save for the shackles and chains that bound me to it—and now it occurred to me that, if it was the same cage I knew from my childhood, it could not possibly be as strong as it once was. I gathered my strength and tugged as hard as I could with my right leg. The cage emitted a promising squeak.

My ankle, however, had begun to bleed, and it was with considerable anxiety that I realized I hadn’t felt the wound. The sight of the red blood, set off against pale flesh, filled me with revulsion and desperation. I set to work freeing myself.

I heaved my body up off the floor, trembling with the effort. Then, gently, I tugged upon the chains that held my left arm and left leg. My body swayed to the left, then swung back to the right—which motion I reinforced with a tug on that side’s chains. When I reached the rightmost point of my swing, I tugged on the left side again, then the right, then the left, until I was swinging as far as I could go.

Blood rushed back into my muscles, giving me the strength to continue—but the revivification of my nerves brought terrible pain to my limbs. I stifled a cry, continuing my swinging, and soon the cage itself began to groan, then squeal, then rock back and forth.

At this point, my muscles were crying out for relief. But it seemed unlikely that I could ever again achieve this momentum, and I found the inner reserves to continue. The cage was leaning now, first one way, then the other, and for a moment I wondered if perhaps I had made a grievous mistake, that I might be torn apart with it—and then, with a terrible screech and a sickening lurch, the entire thing leaned, then cracked, then folded up like a cardboard box.

Of course I was inside. The roof of the thing—a thick piece of hardwood ply, if my observations were correct—lay on top of my bruised and bleeding form, having crushed my face as it fell. I could feel blood coursing out of my nose. I managed, somehow, to roll over, my chains having broken free of their mounts, and push up the roof with my back. In a few seconds, I had managed to wriggle out from under it, and lay in the courtyard, delirious with pain. It was there that I fell unconscious.

When I woke, my clothes, pack, and quiver lay by my side, and the shackles had been removed from my wrists and ankles. In the peculiar state of mind that my incarceration had engendered, I did not stop to consider the implications of this fact—namely, that Doctor Avery Stiles had seen me lying there asleep, and had freed me completely, leaving me armed.

It was ten minutes, perhaps, before I was able to sit up. With great slowness and deliberation, I dressed and took up my quiver and pack, and when I was through I carefully got to my feet, bracing myself against the wall of the compound.

The courtyard was echoless, the night clear, the moonlight bright.

I stumbled to the compound doorway and quietly made my way down the stone staircase. The Doctor wasn’t there, only the glowing remains of his fire. My childhood possessions, as well, were gone. I climbed back up and staggered toward the tunnel in the west wall, my knees quivering, my breaths quick and shallow. I crouched down before the tunnel opening and crawled through. I had escaped from the castle.

I stood outside the curtain wall, scanning the treeline with my tired eyes. My muscles throbbed, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down on the ground and go to sleep. But I could not. I had to find Doctor Stiles.

Convinced that no one was watching, I limped across the clearing and stepped over the deadfall and into the woods. Little moonlight penetrated here, so I waited as my eyes, already starved for daylight, adjusted to the gloom, and my body tingled and ached. I breathed in the humusy air and tried to imagine what the Doctor was doing out here, and where he might be. Was he waiting for me? Did he expect me to escape? Did he wish to test me, once again, in the wild?

I was not permitted to go to the castle with Doctor Stiles the week after my all-night adventure, nor the week after that. I was uncertain what had transpired between my parents, but there was a tension, and more than once I spied my mother, through the bathroom keyhole, applying makeup to a bruise. Her resistance to my father, at the time, seemed to me pigheaded and foolish—why couldn’t she see that what the Doctor was teaching me was for my own good, that I was being formed into a man? I had not, of course, forgotten the terror and agony I endured that night in the woods. But already those emotions seemed like the products of a childish imagination, signs of weakness to be renounced and forgotten. I hardened my heart against my mother’s best intentions.

Now, in the forest, my vision had returned, and my body was once again under my control. But I remained still for some time, alert for the presence of my quarry. There had been a breeze when I emerged from behind the castle wall; now the wind had died to nothing, and the woods were silent.

Perhaps it was a sixth sense that caused me to think of the rock. I took a step back, then another to the west, until an opening revealed itself between the boughs of the tall pines, and I was able to see up the cliffside to the northern lip of the “ankle.” At first, I believed that I was seeing nothing more sinister than an unremembered outcropping. But then it moved, and I realized that it was the Doctor’s form, outlined against the starry sky. He had been there, watching me, waiting for my next move.

Before he could decide to give up his wait, I retreated farther into the trees and made my way west, and then south, toward the “toe.” The woods were fairly sparse for the first twenty or so feet beyond the treeline, and I stuck to this easier terrain, taking care not to strain or twist my weakened legs. It wasn’t long before I had made it to the southern end of the rock, and I crept to the clearing’s edge, and peered out from the cover of the woods. The moonlight sharply outlined the rock, and I searched its face for any sign of Doctor Stiles. If he still stood on the northern lip, my angle of sight made it impossible to tell.

I waited several more minutes, to be sure I was safe, then gathered my strength and sprinted across the clearing to the “toe.”

It was easier, this time, to climb up over its lip, and onto the broad plateau where the lone pine grew from its soil-filled bowl. I soon found myself at the base of the “ankle,” staring up into the moonlit night, and trying to remember the series of hand- and footholds that had taken me safely to the top. Time was of the essence—Doctor Stiles wouldn’t stay there forever, and I did not wish to meet him on the rock face, where his doubtless superior climbing experience would put him at an advantage. I could not be burdened by my pack, so I lowered it quietly to the ground, keeping only my climbing shoes, gloves, and quiver. My helmet I had left behind at the house, never dreaming that I would need to scale the rock face again—I would see if the smug sporting goods clerk had been correct in his confidence that it was unnecessary.

With as much speed as I could muster, I began to clamber up the sheer face, pushing my weakened arms and legs to the limit. It was with some surprise that I remembered my former path of ascent—the holds came quickly and naturally, and my progress was speedy. Under normal conditions, I am certain, I would have been unable to find the strength to climb that cliff, but extreme circumstances draw out hidden powers in men, and my aching body proved more capable than I could possibly have hoped.

I paused on a ledge to catch my breath and give my fingers a break. The wind, which had died down to nothing some minutes before, now somehow seemed deader still, as if time itself had stopped, and not merely the motion of the air. I had reached the roof level of the forest canopy, and the treetops stretched out in all directions like a stubblefield. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought it would be possible to walk across it, this landscape of gentle silver swells, or to sail it, navigating around those few signs of human habitation below: radio antennas, church steeples, office buildings. It was a heartening, restful sight.

But for now, my rest was over. The motionless air pressed in. Every sound was magnified—my shoes on the rock, my shallow breaths. I turned back to the wall, found my handholds, and climbed.

As I came closer to the summit, I slowed, and concentrated on keeping quiet. I hoped for a breeze, to cover the noise of my ascent, but there was nothing. Soon I could detect the cliff’s edge just above me, and I knew that Doctor Avery Stiles was there—possibly at the northern lip of the “ankle,” standing with his back to me, and possibly just above, waiting for my face to appear, waiting to send me to my death with a single kick.