Castle: A Novel (20 page)

For one brief moment, I wondered if it was all really worth it, if I should simply turn back and leave all this behind—the woods, the castle, the rock, the Doctor. I doubted the very reasoning behind my entire mission: was it absolutely necessary to have come out here in pursuit of the old man? If Doctor Stiles wanted to kill me, then why didn’t he come into my house while I slept, and do away with me there? There had been ample opportunity for him to take me by surprise, to attack when my guard was down. Indeed, his capture of me was entirely attributable to my encroachment into his territory. If anything, it was I who was the aggressor.

And what would I do once I’d gained the upper hand? Would I attempt to extract some promise from him, that he would never bother me again? An admission that he was no longer my master—that I had absorbed, then exceeded, his tutelage? Or would I merely kill him?

Moreover, was this the reason I had come to Gerrysburg? To find an old man and murder him? Clinging there on the rock face, I cast my mind back to the day I decided to return to my home town. Obviously, I believed I had unfinished business here—I thought that, by revisiting the site of my tutelage, I might somehow clarify my memories of those strange years, and soothe the humiliations of the recent past. But specifically how this would work, I didn’t know. In fact, I didn’t believe that I’d ever known; and the details of my decision to begin this adventure seemed hazier in memory by the minute. I shifted my position incrementally, seeking a more comfortable hold, and wondered about my motives and desires. In my life, I had dedicated myself to understanding the motives of others, through careful study of their words and actions, as had Doctor Stiles before me. But could it be that neither of us had ever really known himself—indeed, that such understanding was impossible? That this mad adventure in the forest was the product of little more than blind instinct, a pathetic expression of formless paranoia and masculine pride?

I felt rather dejected at this moment, and once again considered turning back. But I shook off my doubts and began to build my resolve once more. To succumb to confusion would be to fall directly into Doctor Stiles’s hands. The danger he represented, after all, had always been subtle, insidious, and difficult to pin down. He controlled others by the threat of action, not by action itself. His very existence was the threat—indeed, he was most dangerous when he was doing nothing, allowing his victims’ imagination to run wild with the terrifying possibilities. My job, as I saw it, was to neutralize this danger, and to shirk that duty would represent a grave cowardice.

With these thoughts still ringing in my head, I drew a deep breath, reached up to the final handholds, and swung myself onto the roof of the rock.

He was there, right where I had imagined him, facing north and peering down at the clearing he mistakenly thought I might, at any moment, re-cross. The sound of my shoes scraping the rock surface spun him around. At last, I faced my nemesis.

The moonlight revealed a wry smile on that ageless face; the Doctor relaxed his stance and took two casual steps forward before he stopped suddenly and raised his hands into the air.

“Eric!” he called out. “What are you doing up here?”

“I’ve come to kill you, Professor.”

It wasn’t until I’d said it aloud that I realized it was true—the Doctor’s death was indeed the real objective of my mission. I felt a long-missing piece of my life’s puzzle falling at last into place. The words hung between us, awaiting a response.

He gave his head a rueful nod, still smiling, as though, in disappointing him, I had nevertheless confirmed some idea he had long harbored about me. He said, “I haven’t been a professor for years, Eric—they took that away from me soon after they took you.” His voice, undiminished by time, carried flawlessly through the motionless air. It was as though he were standing beside me. He took another step closer.

“Don’t move,” I said, reaching for my quiver. “I don’t intend to listen to your explanations. The time for those is over.”

But Doctor Stiles merely shook his head. “You were an excellent pupil, Eric. I had high hopes for you.”

“You should not have made me your enemy, then,” I replied, and I drew forth my bow and nocked an arrow—the arrow that had murdered the white deer.

The Doctor’s grin widened. “Ah! I see you have a bit of my handiwork, there,” he said.

“So it was you.”

“Of course it was,” he replied. And then, after a moment’s pause, he relaxed his smile, his eyes narrowed, and he went on. “Eric, I can see your mind is made up about me, and about what you’re doing here. But I want to tell you that destroying me is not the answer. In fact, you don’t even know what the question is, do you?”

I drew back the arrow. My fingers ached from the climb, and my right arm trembled.

“You think that by taking my life, your own will be restored.” He lowered his hands, and slipped them into the pockets of his pants. Indeed, he appeared relaxed, as if I were no danger at all. “The fact is, Eric, that you cannot restore your own life by killing me.

“Furthermore, your life doesn’t need to be restored,” he went on, edging away now, toward the northern lip of the rock. My aim tracked his slow movement. “It merely needs to be seized. And my life—my life was never here to be taken.”

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 fell 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.