Project Cain (18 page)

D
ad?

Dad, hey, yeah . . . it’s me.

Jeff.

I’m good. I’m . . . I want to go home.

I don’t know. Pennsylvania somewhere. There’s this—

No. There’s this guy.

His name is Castillo.

I don’t think so.

I think he’s with, like, the Army or something.

DOD?

Yeah, Department of—

No.

He wouldn’t do that.

No, he won’t. He wouldn’t—

I’m
not
a baby. Where are you?

No, it does matter. Where the fuck are you?

Yes, I am. I am “upset.” I’m . . . I don’t understand what’s happening.

You didn’t tell me anything.

You didn’t tell me anything.

You’re lying. You’re always lying.

What happened?

At DSTI? Massey. What happened there? What did you do?

It does matter. It’s everything. Did you . . . Did you kill someone?

I don’t understand what that means. I—

Yes. Yes, I’m listening to you.

No. No. I don’t understand what any of that means.

No, I never will. Where are you?

Are the other guys with you? David? Ted—

Yes, that’s who Castillo is looking for. And you . . .

No, I don’t think so. I’ll . . . No. It’s just me. I wanted—

When are you coming home?

No, Haddonfield is home. That doesn’t— When are you coming home?

Then come and get me. You—

Why not?

Come and get me.

Why? What . . . What did I do wrong?

Then why did you take them and not me?

I don’t believe that.

You hate me, don’t you.

Another lie.

Well . . . I hate you.

Dad?

T
he woman in the black dress covered the whole world, her absolute darkness continuing for as far as I could see in any direction. I stared up at her, defeated, sitting with my back against the motel wall just to keep from crumpling to the ground. I was still outside. It was cold, the parking lot quiet and still. I don’t know what time it was. Two moths fluttered just above my head by the outside light, slamming themselves against the bulb, killing themselves, just to get away from the woman’s terrible shadow.

She’d somehow swallowed all the surrounding streets and buildings. Trees, mountains. Everyone. Above, the whole sky. Everything. The stars shimmered within. Small, lost. Futile. Trapped above forever in her unbroken grasp like teeny white sheets over lifeless lumps or like twinkling dots on a map. Her untold victims. Her brood. Thousands upon thousands scattered far and wide. Both the killers
and
the killed. Victims all. One star shined the brightest and largest of all but still so small in her immeasurable gloom.

I imagined that desolate single star as my father. Caught somehow in “Her” mysterious sway. She’d apparently first called to him when he was a boy, reaching out across eternity. An inherited memory from another
age, he believed, from an ancestor who’d lived more than a hundred years before. And who was I to disbelieve him? Just as I saw the faces of Dahmer’s victims, my father had seen her. Calling out to him, luring him, for decades until finally, I figured, he’d succumbed. Now, I feared, he was finally hers. Maybe always had been.

And when my dad had hung up, I’d looked up to the night sky and finally seen her for the first time. What I’d seen in that motel room, in my dream, had been only a hint. This was she in her full glory. Terrifying
and
beautiful. And then I surrendered. What else could I do? In nightmares I’d had, there’d always been a point when I knew to quit. The THING chasing me was simply too strong, too powerful to escape or defeat. It was better just to stop running. The fear of the thing catching you was surely far worse than the actual end. It was, in the dreams, always a comforting thought. Surrender. Of course, I always woke up just as the THING—whatever it was in the dream—got me. Not now, though. When
this
Evil was ready to fully claim me, as she had my father and so many years before, it would just happen. This time, there’d be no waking up.

•  •  •

I eventually somehow pulled myself back to my feet and then slowly got the door open again. Castillo was still asleep in the chair. I tiptoed into the room and the darkness from outside snuck right in after me. I could feel its fingers on my back and I would swear to this day that the room grew darker as I entered. I crawled into bed and carefully laid the phone on the desk between our beds. I’d already deleted the history of searches I’d made and my call to my dad. I don’t know why. I didn’t really care anymore what happened or what Castillo thought of me. In the morning, I would ask him to take me to DSTI. They, at least, knew what I was.

A factory, a source—of Evil.

And while I didn’t really expect the black-dressed woman, that Evil, to sweep down and claim me in the flesh, surrendering to DSTI seemed the next best thing.

•  •  •

I lay awake, my thoughts finding solace only in the darkest corners of the room. Castillo startled awake. Scratched at his week-old beard. Looked around the room like he’d never been asleep. Started to work again. Finally I faded in and out of sleep myself.

There, images of my father came to mind. He was with a woman. A young woman. And she was smiling. No, screaming. I could hear her screaming.

Next I saw Spanelli. David Spanelli.

One of the six clones that Castillo was looking for.

A clone of David Berkowitz. Also called the Son of Sam. This Berkowitz shot a bunch of strangers once, said his dog was possessed
by the devil and told him to do it. (Clichés always start somewhere real, you know.) Anyhow, I didn’t know anything about David Berkowitz at this point and certainly didn’t think of David Spanelli in this way. David Spanelli’d always been cool and would never have had anything to do with any of this regardless.

And yet . . .

And yet, I now envisioned us all standing together and there was this car and something happening behind it. There were other people there. Two other teenagers. One had a rock in his hand.

He was swinging it down at something behind the car.

And the car’s taillights were flashing, making everything red. Then a sudden flash of white light!

I shivered awake. The dream—what else could it be?—was already slipping away.

(Note: I had no idea what that dream meant at the time, and never really would. I know only that the six boys who escaped Massey, and some of the guys
they
then helped escape, ended up doing some really terrible things. And sometimes, somehow, I saw these things too.)

That woman in the dress. Evil. Murder. Cain XP11. I don’t care what you call it. I know it was black. (Clichés always start somewhere real, right?)

And in that same blackness I found sleep again but also more thoughts and fears and fancies taking shape. More nightmares.

•  •  •

It was Ted again now. And he was in a doorway. Standing over me in the doorway so that all I could see was his silhouette in the small dark room. But I still knew it was him without a doubt. He looked a hundred feet tall like that. I turned. There was something in the bathtub. Something rocking slowly back and forth. Making strange sounds.
And Ted was laughing now. And I felt myself being pulled down some back street. Running. Moving faster than I’d ever run before in my life. The dark streets and buildings moved by so quickly. I was looking for something. . . . The faces merging now, the dreams swirling into one. My dad’s face, spattered with blood. A knife in his hands. No, Ted’s face. David’s now.

Then something more skeletal emerging. Something even blacker than the woman’s dress. Eyes glinting like the edge of a knife.

Jaws widening . . . becoming MY face now.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s face.

Jaws widening . . . stretching too far. Bones cracking.

Because the blackness wasn’t some evil trying to get IN.

It was something deep inside me trying to get OUT.

I felt it crawling up my throat. Choking.

I awoke again.

My body was covered in sweat. I lay still in bed in the total darkness. My heart thumping like a hummingbird’s.
Good,
I thought. Let the nightmares come in battalions. I’d accepted my fate. The world wasn’t just a “half-empty glass.” The world’s glass was smashed into a million jagged pieces, and its contents spilled over the table like warm blood.

You’d think this was a bad thing. But it wasn’t.

I’d found great comfort in knowing it couldn’t get any worse.

That’s about when Castillo started screaming.

•  •  •

Castillo had three nightmares during these two weeks. I can’t really say which was “the worst.” For me, of course, it was hands down this one. The first. And to say he scared the shit out of me is crude hyperbole but not by much.

I’d never heard a sound quite like it. At the time, it was the most horrifying sound I’d ever heard. (Later I would hear worse. [I’d
make
worse myself.]) But in that pitch-black room, half-lost in sleep and nightmares myself, this was not a sound from the tomb but deep from behind the very gates of hell itself. It sounded like someone had just slit his throat. And for half a second I thought that’s what had happened. A scream that went in, Castillo sucking in air in a high-pitched wail of terror that just kept getting higher and louder. It lasted, like, ten seconds, but I would have sworn then it was an hour.

I scrambled off my bed and put a hand on the door.

Across the room Castillo made several grunts, fumbled for the light switch.

I had vague memories at that point of a similar scream earlier. A scream from one of my dreams nights before. I thought I’d imagined it. Now I suspected it’d been Castillo and maybe this wasn’t the first. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.

Castillo turned the light on. The room was totally empty.

We were alone. He was unhurt.

Castillo’s whole body was shaking. His breath coming out a hundred miles an hour. I thought he was gonna have a heart attack. He mumbled: What the F was that? He mumbled: You good? And I told him I was, but could hardly get the words out myself because I was, I gotta admit, trying not to laugh.

This Army assassin was totally trembling. The UFC-built badass with the gun and tats, the amazing stare-down, and the nasty scars all over.
Trembling in fear.
Castillo even tried acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. Tried making it seem like I was the one who’d done something wrong. Gave me this annoyed
Why-the-hell-are-you-standing-by-the-door? look. OK, he told me. Get some sleep. Like I was the one who’d just had a total freak-out and woken everyone up. You gotta be kidding me.

He turned the light back off and turned to the other wall away from me. In the total darkness I could hear his breathing. It hadn’t slowed at all. I’d swear I could hear his heart thumping too. And it went on like that for a good hour.

You’d think I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep after something like that.

But I did. I actually slept more soundly than I had since before all this had started. Since my old life.

Because it was the very first time I thought of Castillo as “normal.”

His world was just as terrible as everyone else’s.

He was human after all.

My only question now: Was I?

In the morning I would convince Castillo to just take me back to DSTI. There they’d know what I really was. And there, when they were done with me, it probably wouldn’t matter anymore.

•  •  •

While we were sleeping, the police finally found the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Nolan in Delaware. Two days before, Mr. Nolan had been shot and Mrs. Nolan had been raped and strangled to death. And, across the street, another dead woman.

In just a few hours now, Castillo’d have all three up on his Murder Map.

The three red dots he was waiting for.

Radiant new stars.

Deaths that would change everything.