Project Cain (7 page)

But what it was, more, was that he looked like he was the only one really ALIVE. And everyone else, all the yapping middle-class white slob teens and their dads were all only half there and really just kinda scenery for whatever it was Castillo was doing. It was weird.

Later, I’d find out he’d been back in the US for only about a year.

Before, he’d spent close to fifteen years overseas. At war.

Then his more-ALIVE-than-everyone-else thing didn’t seem so weird.

•  •  •

Come on, Castillo said, and we moved deeper into the property to where the paintball version of “battlefields” were. It was tough to see faces because everyone was wearing masks, but we waited and watched. Nothing. Castillo kept us moving.

The largest field at ALLSTAR Paintball was covered in dozens of giant wooden spools and old trailers and even a two-story fort on each side. We watched from a small hill overlooking the field with about a dozen other people. There must have been forty people on each team. All screaming orders at each other and laughing and yelling. Someone even tossed a smoke grenade that landed in the middle of the grass field and made purple-gray smoke roll over a whole section of the playing area.

In that smoke with the masks, with everyone yelling like that, any one of them could have been Henry. Like this, ALL of them
looked like the genetic offspring of some terrible killer.

I looked over the whole battlefield again, and it had changed.

A mound of burnt grass I hadn’t really noticed before, the way the purple-gray smoke snaked around one of the giant wood spools, the contour with which two players had thrown themselves to the ground for cover. The dead center of the field had started taking on a new look. The paintball ground slowly waning, fading into another shape altogether. One I recognized all too well. Its mouth opening in a silent scream of purple-gray smoke that—

I looked away.

Beside me, Castillo asked if I’d seen something.

No, I lied, and acted like I was looking at the field again but instead watched Castillo from the corner of my eye. There was no way I was EVER looking at the field again. Castillo waited and watched the players “die” one by one. But he wasn’t really watching them either, I could tell. He may have been looking at the field, but his eyes were shooting right through it like all those people weren’t even there. I could only imagine what he was really thinking about. At the time, I figured he was thinking about me. I know better now.

He waited for them to exit the field, taking off their masks when they came back through the netting. All strangers. Castillo showed a picture of Henry to one of the refs when he came off the field.

You some kind of cop? the high school kid asked, and laughed.

No, Castillo said. Nothing like that.

Behind him, the purple-gray smoke drifted up to the sun.

Still screaming.

T
he hotel was a dump. I’d never stayed somewhere so nasty. It smelled like cigarettes and dirt. I didn’t say anything, but Castillo must have read my face because he told me there were a lot worse places to stay.

We’d just entered the room when Castillo turned and locked the door. For the first time in my life, it didn’t feel like the world was being locked out. I was being locked IN.

Castillo waved me deeper into the room. Come here, he said.

My whole body half jumped into the ceiling. It finally dawned on me where I was and with who. A total stranger. Some lunatic who worked somehow with the same guys who’d busted into my house and stolen my lizard. I figured he’d finally gotten those orders from DSTI and was going to murder me just like my dad had warned. Steal my brain for science or something.

From a plastic bag the lunatic pulled out a pair of scissors.

OHMYGOD, OHMYGOD, OHMY—

We gotta do your hair, he said. (Note: This didn’t ease my concerns any.)

Still he kept waving me toward the dark bathroom. Said we had to cut and dye my hair. (My hair’s basically sandy blond. He now wanted it dark brown.) Explained people would be looking for me. Not the police. But DSTI or the government.

I asked: Aren’t YOU the government?

Castillo said they’d told him to find the six missing boys from Massey and that was it. The only reason he’d even come to my house at all was to maybe dig up some information on my dad, who was obviously involved in some way, information on where these six guys were and maybe even what had happened at Massey that night.

He said that if they—DSTI
or
his bosses—ever said he was supposed to find me, he’d give me a week’s head start and some money. (In retrospect, this was a cool thing to say. But at the time it just made him seem more terrifying than ever.)

And if they find me? I asked.

He didn’t know. Just said that he’d rather they didn’t.

I asked if they’d kill me.

He didn’t know.

It was true. He really didn’t.

And, for the first time, I kinda got it.

The room. The stupid hats. The hair.

He was just as afraid as I was. Afraid they’d find us. Of what would happen if they did. And I could tell he hated giving me that answer.

I don’t know.

I could tell that answer was one of the worst things he’d ever said.

I followed him into the bathroom, where he sat me on the john and cut all my hair. He was trying to be cool about it, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t on the verge of crying the whole time. Humiliated, abandoned,
confused, scared. Every shitty feeling you could think of. And all at the same time.

He asked if I was OK, told me we were almost done.

I tried to keep still. Watched him mess with the gloves and mix the hair stuff.

You done this before? I asked.

He nodded.

I asked when, but he ignored me and just put that stuff in my hair. It smelled terrible, like vinegar, and stung my eyes.

Sorry, he said.

The way he said it, I knew he wasn’t just talking about my hair.

•  •  •

Five minutes later, I stood alone in the shower and kept my eyes closed tight as the smelly hair dye finished doing its job. It felt greasy in my fingers. When I opened my eyes, the dye’s residue still ran down my body and pooled at my feet in the water. Swirling away slowly down the drain and looking way too much like dark blood.

I kept thinking about those pictures, the ones taken at Massey. As I watched that dark “blood” roll over and through and around my toes, I kept trying to imagine what had really happened in the Activity Center. And I tried also to
not
think about it at all.

That’s when the dye started to take shape in the water.

A particular shape. Just a hint.

A jawline, maybe, and an eye forming on the right side that—

I closed my eyes again and held my face into the hot water. Then found the handle and turned until the water got colder, colder, colder. . . . Chasing all thoughts away. Anything I
might
have seen.

I hid in that shower a long, long time.

•  •  •

When I got out, I looked like I was maybe six years old in the mirror. Momentously stupid. My hair all hacked away and dark. I dried off and put my clothes back on. I hid in the bathroom as long as I could. Eventually, Castillo shouted to me, asked if everything was OK. I said yeah. Still, I waited another few minutes.

He was working at the small desk in the room with his laptop and a map and a bunch of papers. I moved past him as carefully and quietly as possible and got to my bed. I just wanted to curl up and die, really. I was so tired. So miserable. I kept thinking if I could just get some sleep, maybe . . .

Didn’t happen. Castillo had other plans. Said he had something else for me to focus on.

Um, OK. . . . My voice trailed off with all the eeriness and alarm suddenly oozing through my whole body.

Francis Tumblety, he said.

I had no idea who that was, and told him as much.

He held up his smartphone.

Showed me pic of a small withered corpse stuffed like a ventriloquist’s dummy in a small box.

Yeah,
that
guy.

•  •  •

My father, as I’d suspected from the start, had not murdered Francis Tumblety.

Turns out this guy’d been dead in the New York ground since 1903.

My father
did
, however (Castillo had the journal entries and even a homemade video to prove it), dig him back up and stuff him in a pseudo-fridge in our house.

For, as I’d also suspected, his DNA.

And this guy had MOST DEFINITELY been chosen for his serial-killer potential. Two reasons:

First, because Francis Tumblety was
maybe
Jack the Ripper.

Refresher: Jack the Ripper was the world’s first famous serial killer. Murdered probably a dozen women in London in the 1880s. And the murders were quite bloody and quite sexual, and the police couldn’t ever catch him and there were, like, two hundred newspapers working in London at the time. And they all made him famous for killing people because (a) it helped sell all those papers, and (b) England ruled the whole world back then and this one guy was like a foot-long bloody turd in their Victorian punch bowl. Jack the Ripper was their 9/11. He reminded civilized society that nobody is ever,
ever
really safe from the monsters. There is always another one waiting down the next dark alley. Behind the shower curtain. Under the bed. On an airplane. In a movie theater or even some kindergarten classroom.

And I say he was
maybe
Jack the Ripper because no one
really
knows who Jack the Ripper was. Dude was never caught, and there are literally, like, twenty possible culprits. For a hundred years now different camps and fans (called “Ripperologists”) have argued about who he really was. Yes, “FANS.” Turns out there are a lot of people who are kinda into serial killers. They find it interesting somehow. I guess that same way people find the Holocaust or Having-Your-Face-Ripped-off-by-a-Monkey “interesting.” (More on this lameness later.)

As for Ripperologists, my father was unquestionably on Team Tumblety.

That, in and of itself, wasn’t that big a deal. Again, if it was your job to collect the DNA of famous serial killers, getting ahold of the real Jack’s DNA was like finding a box of Einstein’s math homework. A new play by Shakespeare. A living Bigfoot. The Holy Grail.

But that wasn’t the only reason my father wanted this man’s DNA.

Or why his old dead body was in my house instead of some lab room at DSTI.

Or why my father had personally, and at great expense, dug the body up himself.

My father had done all those things for another reason.

And that reason, the REAL reason, it turned out, was kinda terrible.

M
y dad thinks he’s Jack the Ripper?

I couldn’t believe I’d just said these words out loud.

And I didn’t mean the
actual
Jack the Ripper, who’d been dead for more than a hundred years. (My dad wasn’t
that
crazy.) Rather that my father believed he was the Ripper’s descendant. His genetic offspring. That Jack the Ripper’s blood and DNA lived on somehow in his body.