Deadman's Castle Page 11

  He cupped his hands together and blew between his thumbs, making a low whistle that was more like a duck than a loon.

  “Why don’t we just go out the front door?” I asked.

  “Okay. Whatever,” said Angelo.

  When we went downstairs it was Dad who came to let us out. “Where are you heading?” he asked.

  “We’re just going for a walk.”

  “Well, okay,” said Dad, grumbling. “You know the rules.”

  As soon as we were out of the house Angelo started asking questions. As little Smasher wove from side to side in front of us, he grilled me about my dad. “Where does he work?”

  “At Fun and Games,” I said.

  “Really?” said Angelo. Then he made the connection. “He’s that guy in the clown clothes, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he walks to work? In his clown suit?”

  “Yeah.” Dad wore those clothes to work, and he wore them home. If he had shopping to do on the way, he did that in his clown suit too. Hardly anyone on Dead End Road had ever seen him without it.

  “Wow, that’s weird,” said Angelo.

  Smasher chased butterflies that rose from little white flowers, while big clouds tumbled along above us. It was a beautiful day and I didn’t want to waste it talking about my father. But Angelo kept asking questions. How long had Dad been working at Fun and Games? What did he do before that?

  “He ran a hardware store,” I said, slipping into the old lie that I knew so well.

  “Where?”

  “In Greenaway.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Oh, it’s a small town,” I said.

  “Yeah, but what state’s it in?”

  And suddenly I had a feeling I’d told him the story before. But I couldn’t remember for sure, or what state I might have named. Stupidly, I said, “I dunno.”

  “You don’t know what state you lived in?”

  “We’ve moved a hundred times,” I said.

  “I thought you lived there all your life.”

  So I had told him the story. Or he’d heard it from Zoe, or from somebody else who had heard it from her. I remembered Dad telling me that I couldn’t build a friendship based on lies, and now I understood why. I saw it crumbling apart.

  “So what state’s Greenaway in?” asked Angelo again.

  He just wouldn’t give up. He was like Smasher with something fixed in her mouth, shaking it every which way. I said, “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Please, Angelo.”

  “Okay.” He shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  But he did. I could tell by the tone of his voice, by the way he turned his head aside. We kept walking, but everything felt different. I was afraid something had changed between us.

  WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE DEAD

  “Crossing Jefferson,” announced Angelo as we stepped out onto that street. “I hope we make it back alive.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was poking fun at me or at my dad. But I actually did feel a bit nervous. As I’d always been warned to do, I watched for an old man in a big car. But this time it wasn’t the Lizard Man I worried about. I watched for my old man in a bright green minivan.

  Angelo said Smasher would lead us right to Deadman’s Castle. “She could get there blindfolded,” he said. When she turned through the gate to a cemetery, he told me she was taking a shortcut. We followed her between the tombstones.

  Walking on graves gave me the creeps. I hated the shallow dents in the grass, knowing what lay underneath. But Angelo didn’t care, and to Smasher it was just a place to chase squirrels. They bolted ahead of her, up the trunks of gnarly old trees.

  The tombstones were moss-covered, ancient and broken. I saw an angel with a clipped wing, a cross with a shattered arm. I saw that someone had put the wrong head on one of the cherubs. And then I saw Zoe lying flat on a grave, and my heart missed a beat.

  She was dressed in her long black coat. Flat on her back, she lay with her feet together, toes pointing up, arms stiff at her sides. Her hair made a black pool around her head, like old blood, and she looked more than ever like a corpse. But as we came closer her head turned, and she called out in a cheery voice, “Hi! Where are you guys going?”

  “Up to the castle,” said Angelo.

  “Cool. I’ll go with you.”

  She rose from the grave like a zombie. Then she brushed bits of grass from her clothes, and we walked together out of the cemetery. A faint tinkling came from her jewelry.

  “What were you doing there?” I asked.

  “Practicing,” she said. “I wanted to know what it’s like to be dead.”

  Half a block farther, Angelo finally asked, “So what was it like?”

  “Kind of boring,” said Zoe.

  We came to the path with a yellow post in the middle and crossed the river on the swinging bridge. A hill appeared in the distance as the road turned to the right. It looked like a toad, green and lumpy, with a flat top made of mounds of bare rock.

  “That’s Deadman’s Castle up there,” said Angelo.

  A broken arch poked up from the rocky summit. Seeing it made my skin turn prickly. All of a sudden, on that warm day, I was shivering.

  I was pretty sure I’d been here before.

  In my mind I could see myself as a little kid, trudging through snow toward that shape on the hilltop. On my hands were red mittens made of wool, and little burrs of snow clung to their backs. I remembered the cold tang on my lips, and the taste of wet wool, as I bit off the tiny snowballs.

  As we walked toward the hill, we passed things that I sort of recognized: a small park with a sandbox and rusted climbing bars; a fence made of iron spikes shaped like arrowheads.

  “I think I’ve been here before,” I said.

  “Not with me,” said Zoe.

  “I know that,” I said. “It’s a feeling.”

  Angelo laughed. “Watson, you’re weird.”

  In a sort of flash, I knew what I’d find around the next bend in the road. I said, “We’re coming to Sandy’s.”

  “What’s Sandy’s?” asked Angelo.

  “The store around the corner.” I could picture it clearly, a little wooden building with a blue awning. If I went inside, a woman who looked like an old witch would sell me candy out of big glass jars.

  Angelo said, “There’s no store, Watson.”

  How could that be? I remembered buying jawbreakers there, and trying to make one of them last all the way home. It clicked against my teeth, and every now and then I pulled it out to see how much was left and what color it had turned to. By the time I got home it was a tiny thing no bigger than a poppy seed.

  I remembered the house. I remembered because I ran inside and stuck out my tongue to show Mom the tiny heart of my jawbreaker. It was a huge white house with four gables on the roof and columns on the porch. In the front yard—on a metal pole—stood a birdhouse that looked exactly the same as the big house.

  It had to be somewhere nearby, and all of that would be proven true as soon as we got to Sandy’s.

  But Angelo was right. There was no store around the corner, just a vacant lot overgrown with prickly bushes. Styrofoam cups and McDonald’s bags had blown in among the branches, and a huge wad of newspaper flyers lay rotting in the dirt.

  “You want to go in and buy something?” asked Angelo.

  “Maybe it was torn down,” I said.

  “Shut up. It was never here.”

  “He’s right,” said Zoe.

  I felt confused. Angelo and Zoe had spent their whole lives near Deadman’s Castle, and if they said there had never been a store they had to be right. But my memories were so clear. I’d looked out the window of that big white house and seen those ruins in the distance. I’d walked there with my dad, on a winter day when the snow was fresh and thick. He had pulled a cardboard box from a dumpster behind a flower store, and I’d used it for a sled on the hill below Deadman’s Castle.
I’d climbed into that box and gone rocketing down a path between the trees. There were broken flower stems inside, and red petals, and they’d flown up around me when I went over a jump at the bottom. Then I’d coasted across a big, flat field with Dad running behind me, laughing.

  Those were all things I remembered. But if I was wrong about Sandy’s, was I wrong about everything?

  We spread out across the road, Zoe walking right along the yellow line, Angelo and Smasher on her left, me on her right. We passed a house that Angelo said was haunted, and while Zoe was laughing at him we came to the school where I’d gone to kindergarten.

  I didn’t say anything to Angelo or Zoe, but I was sure I was right. As we walked along the side of the building, I saw a red door that I remembered. Then we came to a playing field that backed onto the tree-covered hill, and I saw the path where I’d sledded in the flower box. The jump at the bottom was just a little cliff only two feet high. But it was still a cliff. In a hazy, dreamy way, everything made sense.

  Except for Sandy’s.

  How could I remember a place that had never existed?

  “WELCOME TO HELL”

  We walked to the top of the hill in just a few minutes. I was disappointed to see that the ruins were just a few stubs of old brick walls that looked like they’d been smashed by a wrecking ball.

  “Why do you call this Deadman’s Castle?” I asked.

  “ ’Cause there’s dead men in it,” said Angelo. “There were bodies sealed up in the walls.”

  Zoe laughed.

  “Well, that’s what I heard,” said Angelo, all defensive.

  “It’s just a dumb name,” said Zoe.

  “Why’s it here?” I asked.

  “The army built it,” said Angelo. “To store bombs and stuff.”

  “Wrong,” said Zoe.

  Angelo was getting annoyed. “So who do you think built it?”

  “A crazy old billionaire,” said Zoe. “He wanted everything hidden under the ground, so he put this thing on top like a fort and dug out all these rooms and tunnels underneath.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Zoe shrugged with her hands in her pockets. “It was like a hundred years ago. I guess he was paranoid.”

  I found it hard to believe that a billionaire would build a mansion inside a hill. But it was possible, and Zoe seemed to think it was true.

  “There’s all sorts of stairs and little rooms,” she said. “It’s pretty cool. You want to see?”

  “Shouldn’t we have a flashlight?” asked Angelo.

  “Why? You don’t need one,” said Zoe.

  “It’s dark in there.”

  “Oh, don’t be a baby. Come on.”

  Zoe stepped through a broken arch, down a shallow slope where the ground had washed into the ruins. Angelo followed her. “Stay close, Smashy,” he said, though he didn’t have to do that. She was only about two inches behind him.

  We skidded down dirt and pebbles to the hard cement floor of Deadman’s Castle. There was a sudden change from sunlight to gloom, from warmth to cold. If I’d been alone, I would have turned around and gone back.

  The walls were covered with spray-painted messages about Satan, with devil faces and the number 666 dripping down the bricks. They faded into distant darkness where anything—or anyone—could have been hiding.

  “It’s too dark down here,” said Angelo.

  “It gets brighter in a bit,” said Zoe. “Haven’t you ever been in here before?”

  “Lots of times. I just haven’t gone this far into it.”

  “Then you’d better pick up your dog.”

  “Why?” asked Angelo.

  “Just pick her up. You’ll see.”

  Zoe started walking again, and I watched her black hair and black clothes vanish into the darkness. Angelo went behind her with Smasher panting in his arms, and he disappeared as well. It would have been too embarrassing to say I was afraid, so I followed them into the darkness.

  I said, “Angelo, where are you?”

  “Right here.”

  We both reached out, and our hands touched in the dark. Though he was standing almost right beside me, I couldn’t see him.

  Zoe moved through the blackness like a bat, while Angelo and I kept bumping into each other. Every now and then Smasher let out a frightened whimper.

  “This is crazy,” said Angelo. “I can’t see nothin’.”

  “Just wait,” said Zoe.

  A patch of gray soon appeared. It became a doorway, and we walked into a room where a ray of sunlight beamed through a crack in the ceiling.

  I smelled cigarette smoke. A putrid mattress lay in one corner, pulled halfway up against the wall to be both a chair and a bed. Wine bottles stood around it like fence posts, some stuffed full of cigarette butts, some with candle stubs wedged in their mouths. Scary messages were written on the walls: Welcome to Hell. This is your future. Leave while you can.

  “Someone lives here sometimes,” said Zoe. “The moon shines through that hole. So even at night it’s not really dark in this room.”

  “You come here at night?” I asked.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “I don’t know about this,” said Angelo. “I think Smasher wants to go back.”

  Zoe laughed. It was a strange sound in that place, like no one had ever laughed there before. She said, “You gotta go a bit farther. There’s something really cool.” Then she took a couple of steps and vanished again. We heard her boots going clunk,clunk down a corridor.

  When they stopped, I had no idea where Zoe had gone. “Where are you?” I said, and my voice echoed from the walls.

  There was a click, a spark, and a little flame appeared. A white skull hovered in the air. It was Zoe looking back, waiting for us in the corridor.

  She kept the lighter burning till we reached her. In its yellow light her jewelry glittered like a cluster of stars, and Smasher’s eyes were shining beads peering from Angelo’s arms. On the floor by Zoe’s feet lay two slim planks that seemed to warp and shift as she raised the lighter.

  I stepped closer.

  “Whoa!” shouted Zoe. Her hand emerged from the dark, reaching out to stop me.

  There was no floor below the planks. They made a narrow bridge over a ten-foot-wide chasm so deep that it swallowed the light from Zoe’s flame.

  It might have been an empty stairway with the stairs taken out. Or an elevator shaft without the elevator. But to me it seemed like a bottomless pit, and there was no way to go around it. I thought we’d gone as far into Deadman’s Castle as we could possibly go. But to Zoe it was nothing.

  “We have to cross one at a time,” she said. “Make sure you stay right in the middle or the planks will tip over.”

  I heard Angelo muttering to himself. I remembered how he had been afraid of the swinging bridge—even in bright sunshine—and I knew the thought of crossing those planks must have terrified him even more than it terrified me. But, being Angelo, he would do it anyway. So I said, “You know, I’ve gone far enough.”

  “Okay, let’s go back then,” said Angelo.

  “Wait,” said Zoe. “Throw something down there.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Hang on a sec.”

  The flame went out. Zoe’s boots pattered away into the darkness. Afraid I might stumble into the pit, I got down on all fours and crawled to the edge. A hand touched my ankle, and Angelo crept up beside me.

  A cold wind blowing up from the terrible darkness carried the eeriest sound I’d ever heard. It was like someone moaning, someone sighing, someone scratching at the floor. I whispered to Angelo, “Do you hear that?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t believe him. He answered too quickly, not even asking what I thought I’d heard. Beside me, he moved back from the edge.

  When Zoe brought her little flame, it made our shadows enormous on the walls. She handed me a bottle, one of the empties from the room we’d passed through. “Drop it down there,” she said.
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br />   I held the bottle over the hole and let it fall. For a second we could see it shining in the dark, a little speck shrinking quickly. Then it was gone, and we waited for the smash at the bottom. And we waited. And we waited.

  I had time to think of what a nightmare it would be to fall down there, cartwheeling through the darkness. Then we heard a tiny smash as the bottle finally shattered.

  “That’s gotta be a thousand feet!” I said.

  Zoe snorted. “Not even close. It’s like only five stories.”

  She had to be right, but it didn’t make any difference. If we fell into that hole, we would die.

  We went back outside and sat in the sunshine. Angelo threw pebbles into the forest, and Smasher ran back and forth to chase them.

  “I heard a kid died down there in the castle,” Angelo said. “People could hear him screaming in the night. But it was two weeks before anyone found him.”

  “In four different rooms,” added Zoe. “That’s what I heard.”

  “Me too,” said Angelo, nodding. “The kid was torn apart.”

  “By dogs?” I asked.

  “By witches,” said Zoe.

  I didn’t believe that. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Well, people who call themselves witches,” she said. “They meet three stories down. They light candles and call up the devil.”

  “Have you seen them?” I asked.

  “No, but I’ve heard them,” said Zoe. “I’ve seen their circles on the floor. Their sacrifices.”

  “Like what?”

  “You don’t want to know,” she said. “I wish I’d never seen it.”

  Angelo and I walked back to my house so he could get his sleeping bag. After he left, I decided to ask my mom about Sandy’s. She was making her telemarketing calls in the kitchen and Bumble was coloring at the table.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. “Do you remember a store called Sandy’s?”

  With a frown, she repeated the name. “Sandy’s?”

  “A little corner store somewhere. There was an old lady who sold candy.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It sounds familiar.”

  “Where was it?”

  “I really don’t remember. There have been so many places. Maybe you should ask your father.”