Project Cain (11 page)

I
sat outside on the balcony of the motel’s second floor, legs slipped beneath the lowest railing and dangling over the dozen rooms below. My fingers wrapped around faded cobalt-blue paint, arms stretched out fully in the warm summer dusk. The motel’s parking lot was still completely empty except for three other cars, and I think one of those might have even belonged to the manager.

Castillo was working in our room, just below. I had the sense he was getting kinda frustrated with the whole thing. He could talk about doing research for two years all he wanted, but it seemed like he was also ready to start kicking in some doors and finding some clones.

It probably didn’t help that I’d been so pointless with my dad’s notes. I hadn’t been able to give Castillo any worthwhile information or feedback. How could I? I hadn’t really even read that much of them to tell the truth. Didn’t want to. When Castillo came back into the room with some food and I handed the laptop back, he’d asked me what I thought and if anything had come to mind, etc., etc. I just made faces like I was thinking really hard and said stuff like “Yeah, some of it did” and I’d have to think about it. I’m pretty sure he knew I was totally full
of it. Worse, I had no idea what I was gonna say if he asked me again. I didn’t know anything about Jack the Ripper. And apparently I knew even less about my own father.

I spent the whole rest of the afternoon lying on the bed, mostly staring up at the ceiling. Wishing myself asleep, away from my rambling gloomy thoughts. The room was clammy and getting smaller by the minute. I could feel its walls closing in on me. And it was
cold
. I don’t know how Castillo could stand it. My whole body was shaking at one point. I’d hoped Castillo might send me out for food again when it was dinnertime, but he’d bought stuff at lunch. Alas. Apparently bologna and bread, and water from the bathroom sink, was enough for lunch
and
dinner. So after my third bologna sandwich, I asked if I could get some fresh air.

Castillo eyed me suspiciously. It was a look I was getting used to.

I thought about saying something like “hey-just-think-of-it-as-another-great-opportunity-for-me-to-run-away-like-you-want-me-to” but didn’t. Instead I went with, “I’ve been in this room, like, all day.” I could tell he was trying to process this information, like he couldn’t understand why this might be an issue for someone. I was living with a robot. He said sure and told me to stick close. (Maybe he didn’t want me running off now, after all.)

Still, I got out of the room as quickly as I could. Castillo’d suggested I buy a soda or something from the main office, but I didn’t feel like walking that way. I hadn’t liked the way that manager guy had looked at me when I’d asked about the phone, and I didn’t want to give him another chance of giving me any crap. So I just wandered along the walkways a couple of times and slowly passed the other rooms. Most every one of them was totally empty. As I passed, I turned a couple of
doorknobs and peeked between some curtains into the rooms. They all proved locked, all dark and empty.

But I hadn’t checked all the rooms on the second floor yet.

Halfway through, I’d decided to park it awhile. Just rest my elbows and head against the railing while kicking my feet off the ledge. Beyond the hotel I could see my Subway shop and streets and even the main highway heading east and west through Pennsylvania. I thought again of just picking one of those two directions (didn’t matter which) and GOING, but the thought didn’t last very long. Instead I watched
other
people heading these directions. Their tiny indistinct shapes inside the cars moving by at seventy miles an hour. I imagined what they were heading away from or toward. The options now seemed almost limitless to me.

I closed my eyes and really breathed fresh warm air into my lungs for the first time in what felt like years but had only been a couple of hours. Felt the warmth of the concrete beneath my butt and legs, the strange chill that had latched on to me in the motel room slowly thawing away.

It was funny to think about the whole world just going on. I mean, when shitty things are going on in
your
life, everyone else just kinda carries on. Business as usual. All those people passing had no idea what was going on in the motel room below me. That some guy working for the government was trying to figure out where the teenage clones of serial killers had gotten to. That at a little-known technology lab in Radnor, Pennsylvania, walls were being cleaned of blood. That bodies there had been removed in the middle of the night.

A dozen people already murdered. Not that a dozen seemed all that much to me anymore.

Castillo’s Murder Map showed that close to forty people were getting killed every single day. Not by cloned teenage serial killers, of course. But by
regular
killers. Your normal everyday kinda murderer types. And the amazing thing to me is that it doesn’t really slow anybody down. All that murder, I mean.

Sure, if it was something local, you might see it on the news and think and even say, “Oh, that’s terrible.” But that wouldn’t mean you aren’t going to work the next day or going to a new movie that same weekend or whatever. It was just another “Oh, that’s terrible.”

Forty people murdered every day, and everyone just kinda shrugs it off.

I wondered how many bodies it would take to make people really notice.

•  •  •

I opened my eyes again. The declining sun had begun turning more red on the horizon, and a black pickup had just pulled into the motel’s lot under its crimson glow. I watched the truck coast across the empty parking lot. Looked like a guy and a girl, maybe college age. She glanced up at me for a second as they pulled in front of one of the rooms on the opposite side of the motel.

I wanted to get back before Castillo got annoyed and came to look for me. Or before I had to admit he had NO intention of ever looking for me. Neither option was too appealing. So I pulled myself up, watching the girl lean on the back of the truck while the guy went into the office. I moved toward the stairwell to get a better look. She seemed pretty enough from afar. The guy, short hair with random tattoos spotted up both arms, opened up one of the rooms and yelled something I couldn’t hear at her.

I suppose I was being nosey, because instead of going down the steps like I’d planned to, I just continued walking slowly along the second floor to the other side. I’d moved away from the railing some so they wouldn’t catch me spying. Below, they unloaded two cases of beer and a couple of backpacks. She asked where something was, and he cursed again, even called her a bitch. Up close she was still pretty, but now I wasn’t sure if she was college age or not. Sometimes she looked no older than I was, but then again there was something in her voice that made her sound like she was, like, thirty. However old she was, she sounded tired to me. She sounded defeated. I figured it’s what I would sound like soon. If I didn’t already. Maybe the Subway guy had heard the exact same thing in my voice.

The two had vanished into the room. As the door closed, I heard the guy say something pretty crude about air-conditioning and her privates. She laughed, but even that had that same defeated sound I’d heard before.

I tapped the railing above their room and looked back toward the spot where I’d been sitting. I don’t know what I expected to see. Maybe myself staring back, I guess. Some kind of
Alice in Wonderland
mirror thing. I only know I felt like I wasn’t alone all of a sudden. I looked down to our room but the door was still shut. No Castillo. I shrugged off the feeling and started moving to the steps again. It was time to get back.

That’s when I noticed.

One of the doors behind me was now open.

•  •  •

Just the narrowest crack. Two rooms away.

I hadn’t noticed the opening when I’d passed, but I’d been focused
on spying then. Don’t know if I’d even have detected it from that angle anyway. The only other cars in the lot were on the other side of the motel, our side. I suppose someone could have walked or taken a bus or . . .

I tried remembering whether or not I’d opened the door myself. My hands absently trying each door latch as I’d passed. I didn’t think so.

It didn’t matter. I would just walk past the door and be on my way.

But I didn’t.

As I got closer to the room, the door opening seemed wider and wider.

And I’d gotten slower and slower.

The gap showed only total darkness on the other side. The smallest hint of a dark green curtain that, I assumed, covered the inside window. There were no sounds from inside. I knew it was just an empty room, the door left open by some part-time maid days before.

I eyed the darkness within.

Anyone could have been on the other side looking back at me. Anyone at all.

I did not, I’ll admit, want to walk past the door and leave it open behind me. No way. So I moved my hand to the latch to pull the door closed, and instead found my hand ON the door, applying pressure. Pushing it more OPEN.

Hello?
My high voice vanished into the room like smoke up a chimney.

NOTHING. My hand pressing more and more.

I saw blue carpet, the foot of an empty bed. Then the desk between. It was just like the room Castillo and I were in, but everything was on the opposite walls. The room was empty. No one was here.

I put a foot into the room, my whole body now pressed against the
door. My free hand searching for a light switch that I just couldn’t seem to find. Everything awash in shadows and the dusk’s red. Slowly peeked my head around the corner to see the rest of the empty room.

And then I saw her.

•  •  •

A woman.

Lying on the second bed facing the ceiling.

She was wearing a long black dress. Her arms extended on either side like Christ, fingers hanging lifeless off the sides of the bed.

There was something wrong with her face.

It was too, too white.

She was wearing a mask of some kind, I decided. Its cheeks and lips painted dark, dark red. Redder than the sun. I could not see the eyes.

Until she turned.

H
e stopped me on the motel steps.

The guy with the tattoos and short hair.

I don’t even remember how I really got there or when he appeared.

I knew I’d run. Slammed a door. I remembered half stumbling down those steps. Crouched on the bottom step, my heart racing. Telling myself I’d seen only shadows in that room. There’d been NO woman in there. I had NOT seen her eyes. Those enormous wide-open painted-on eyes. Oversize cartoonish anime eyes.

I needed to pull myself together before I went back in to Castillo. He thought I was enough of a freak without my giving him total proof. If I was losing my mind, I was going to do it alone. He would never know. No one would EVER know. I sure as hell wasn’t going to write about it in any damn journal like my father had.

This tattoo guy was all like: “Hey, kid!” and “You’re F-in’ wasted, man, ain’t you?” and “Get this dude!” A real idiot, this one.

I mumbled back some response. Something like HUH? Probably wasn’t even English. Didn’t exactly come across as a Rhodes scholar myself, I guess. I could barely figure out where I was. Still trying to
understand what it was I’d seen in the room. A hallucination, I figured. Some kind of nightmare that’d followed me into the real world.

God knows it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d seen something that wasn’t really there.

But the days of
blaming
it on a car accident that I now knew never happened wasn’t gonna fly anymore.

I needed to pull myself together. Didn’t know if I could. Ever.

And the current situation was in no way helped by this guy, this absolute moron, laughing at me. I didn’t even have the strength in my legs to stand up and walk away.

He was practically howling. Asking me if I wanted a beer.

Huh?
It was apparently the only word I had anymore. I wanted to shout:
HEY, ASSHOLE. HOW ’BOUT YOU LEAVE ME ALONE A MINUTE AND GO UPSTAIRS YOURSELF AND DEAL WITH THAT DEAD LADY ON THE BED.

But we all know I did no such thing, because (1) What would he possibly do about the imaginary woman upstairs? and (2) I was too chickenshit.

I
did
, however, manage to grab the banister to help pull myself up. It was a start. (Small victories, you know. They were like gold these days.)

He asked again if I wanted a beer. Suggested I was wasted again. Asked now if I wanted to smoke some pot with them. His girlfriend had come to their door. I just kept saying no.

His voice now totally reminded me of another. (Henry’s.) ’Cause now he started getting all in-your-face about it. Called me a faggot and stuff. (Now he sounded like Ted.)

I’d somehow made it totally to my feet. I felt like I’d just topped Mount Everest.

Told him “thanks,” told him I was “cool.” Just meaningless prattle to get away.

Yeah, you’re cool, he said. You’re cool, kid. Hey . . . hey . . . He was really giggling absolute fits now, could barely finish a thought, and I started really looking at him for the first time. HE was the one who was drunk or high or something. Whatever. Anything to take my mind away from the room upstairs, from whatever trick of light I’d seen. This guy was actually a total godsend.