Jonathan Thomas’s collections of weird fiction include Stories from the Big Black House (Radio Void Press, 1992), Midnight Call and Other Stories (Hippocampus Press, 2008), and Tempting Providence and Other Stories (Hippocampus Press, 2010). Arcane Wisdom has published his Lovecraftian novel The Color Over Occam, and his short stories have appeared most recently in Postscripts 22/23 and the first Black Wings of Cthulhu (both from PS Publishing). Thomas is a native of Providence, Rhode Island.
DWIGHT PEEKED PAST DRAWN SHADE IN THE LIVING room to make sure the yard crew had decamped before he switched on the underground sprinkler system. Yes, they were gone, but how long had that frail old guy been pacing back and forth out front, in this July scorcher? Like a stray dog with a fix on some tantalizing scent? And why did he keep casting coppery bright eyes toward the house, and were those eyes probing, or beseeching, or resentful? If he was casing the place—not that he looked physically capable of burglary—he scored no points for stealth. In fact, Dwight was a little surprised none of the neighbors had called the cops on this blatantly “suspicious character.”
Edith reached from behind his shoulder and parted the shade another inch to let her see what was so absorbing. Made him jump. “Maybe he needs to use a bathroom,” she speculated. “Maybe he needs to borrow a phone. Maybe he’s thirsty.”
“But why does he have to be thirsty here?” Dwight didn’t consider himself the least mean-spirited. Or elitist. It just seemed a fair question.
“Well, we can’t stand by and let him limp around till he gets sunstroke.” Edith had an extraordinary gift for telling Dwight what to do short of coming right out with it. All right, so she was only hastening the decision he’d have made on his own, eventually. That didn’t help him feel any less like a hapless pinball as he chucked a pair of gold cufflinks into a sideboard drawer to be on the safe side, bumped into the row of suitcases ready in front hall for dawn taxi to the airport, and opened the door onto triple-digit heat index. A world of stunning difference from the central air inside. Dwight needed a few seconds to regroup before calling out, “Can I help you?”
But by then, ancient geezer had shuffled halfway up the grey slate walk. His burnished eyes never blinked as they narrowed upon Dwight, and he licked cracked lips, priming them to speak. In his expression resided a strength of will completely at odds with his general infirmity. Osteoporosis had crumpled him so severely that the average catalpa pod looked more substantial. His dark but bloodless complexion reminded Dwight of walnut meat, with comparably deep wrinkles and hairlessness to match.
Dwight was a washout when it came to pegging ethnicities, and even at the edge of point-blank range couldn’t tell if angular features were Hispanic or Italian or Syrian. “Mediterranean” struck him as a rational compromise. And the outfit was emphatically generic. White button-down shirt with long sleeves, loose khaki trousers, sandals. If anything, too much coverage for this hothouse climate. Maybe he suffered from poor circulation. “Please, I come back after long, long time away,” he wheezed. “I do not want to steal.” The rutted face peered up at Dwight’s as if in supplication, but also as if Dwight owed him something, an insinuation with which he was less than comfortable. What’s more, the accent contributed nothing toward defining the stranger’s pedigree. Cajun? Portuguese? Mexican? Dwight was starting to feel rudderless. Say something! “Did you work for the people who used to live here?”
“This place was mine! Something of mine is still here!” Oh, shit. Dwight had wounded the catalpa pod’s dignity. He’d also been blindsided by that claim to former ownership, and who was he to brand anyone a liar out of hand? Still, he couldn’t see it, not in this upper-crust Colonial Revival enclave, in what had always been, well, an unapologetically white bastion on the East Side of Providence. Like water into cracked cement, the geezer took advantage of Dwight’s nonplussed state to slip past him and into the house. This turn of events had scarcely registered when Edith’s startled yelp pulled Dwight inside on the double.
How had those decrepit legs carried the unwanted guest to the living room already? Dwight heard him mewl, “Please, I am only Castro. I have come back here for something that is mine.” Edith was still at the window, and this so-called “Castro,” with hands upraised in a medieval-looking gesture of appeasement, had violated her personal space, to judge by her red cheeks and arched eyebrows and incisors biting into lower lip. She was wedged in among the beige velvet drapes, and had backed well beyond arm’s length from the doddering intruder. Dwight could understand why she was aghast, even if it seemed an overreaction. She treated Dwight to a glance that fairly bristled, I meant for you to find out what he wanted, not ask him in! Oh, boy. No smoothing this over till she decided in due course to cool off.
Instead, Dwight aimed for a conciliatory tone toward Castro, who was, after all, merely a feeble and confused, if not senile, old specimen. As if anything of his were really on the premises! “Mr. Castro, why don’t you have a seat? I’m sure we can get this sorted out in a minute.” Castro eyed him as if wary of forked tongues, waddled backward and away from Edith, sized up the furnishings, and planted himself in the leather Deco club chair, their most valuable piece, facing the plasma TV. Dwight perched at one end of the puffy canvas sofa, across the room from the rear picture window, setting his guest in three-quarters profile. Castro swiveled on the squeaky upholstery to confront him head-on, putting Dwight unjustly on the defensive.
Edith, with a valiant post-traumatic smile, was rebounding from the drapes, rising to the occasion, doing her part to defuse the awkwardness. “Can I get you something to drink? It’s so humid out there, isn’t it?” Barely making eye contact, let alone giving Castro a chance to answer, she was off to the kitchen, with that sway in her hips, more pronounced when she was in a hurry, that Dwight had found so provocative in premarital days, before realizing she couldn’t help it, that it wasn’t meant to turn him on. Maybe she was less interested in relieving Castro’s thirst than in jumping at any excuse to absent herself a while.
Castro did watch her departure with what Dwight preferred to regard as appreciation. Yes, the man must have been parched, though no more perspiration shone on his furrowed skin than on petrified wood, as if his sweat glands had worn out over decades. Nor did he proffer her thanks or other nicety, but to Dwight he confided, “She is pretty, your wife.”
Dwight for the life of him couldn’t think up an answer to that. Castro didn’t visibly care, content with an armchair inspection of the room, from Japanese woodblock prints on the wall to Erté bust on Corinthian pedestal to bronze figurines from Benin on the mantel. Casing the place despite protests to the contrary? Dwight wished in vain for something to say, if only to curtail the mental checklist. Jeez, had the sneaky codger noticed the luggage on his way in? Good luck enjoying Costa Rica for two carefree weeks now. And where the hell was Edith with that glass of whatever?
“Here we are!” she lilted, bustling in with a blue plastic tumbler of cola. In her own good time, as usual. Handed it to Castro, who sniffed it with pursed, questioning lips as the fizz subsided. He tasted it and his features crinkled disdainfully.
“Please, can you put nice rum in this?” he demanded. “Nice Cuban rum.”
Dwight and Edith exchanged helpless frowns, far from thrilled at prospects of a drunk, out-of-control foreigner in their den. More disturbing, it was as if Castro knew about that liter of Edmundo Dantes, a gift from Dwight’s boss, who’d smuggled it in through Canada. It was locked in the bottom drawer of Second Empire china cabinet in the dining room. On reserve for special occasions. Was Castro psychic? Or a practical joker in the employ of Dwight’s boss? In either case, refusing him would likely result in an ugly scene sooner rather than later. This Castro, as two minutes with him had demonstrated, was nothing if not irascible.
Another excuse for Edith to duck out, anyway, and she seized upon it without comment. Dwight heard her clattering in the McCoy bowl full of Lindt chocolates where they hid the key to the cabinet, and then the key rattling in the lock. Castro was also listening, head cocked quizzically to one side. More clinking and scraping of glass against glass, across wood. Followed by the squeal and pop of a cork stopper.
Edith tripped back in, with a cheerful demeanor that may have been less transparently phony to Castro than to Dwight. Castro had to hold out his cup to meet Edith’s outstretched arm with the open bottle. Quite admirable, her skill at hovering no closer than absolutely necessary to get the job done. “Say when!” Her smile did become brittle as the level of liquid rose significantly in the cup before Castro gave an understated nod of approval. He sampled the expensive concoction and smacked his arid lips with gusto. Nobody’s fault if it sounded more to Dwight like the click of mandibles.
Dammit, with all that fussing over the drink, Dwight had almost forgotten Castro’s purported reason for worming his way in, and beaming Castro was relaxing and enjoying his rum and coke way too much. Dwight leaned forward from the edge of the sofa and aspired to a stern, authoritative timbre. “Mr. Castro, when we bought this house, the attic was completely empty, the basement was completely empty, and every cupboard and closet was completely empty. Unless we’ve missed a secret crawlspace or trapdoor, anything you mislaid was gone when we moved in.”
“Mislaid?” huffed Castro scornfully. Then he nestled deeper in the maroon leather, sipped his drink, and adopted a more serene air. “Please, Mrs. Nickerson, you sit down too.” Castro extended his free arm toward the sofa and drew circles in the air with his index finger. Edith sighed and played along. Keeping a lid on her impatience, but no longer smiling. Dwight wondered whether guest or hostess would blow up first. Edith had an extensive record of speaking her mind on short notice.
Wait a minute, how had Castro known their last name? Dwight had to rein in his alarm. Let the old guy spook you, and you pass the ball to his court. “Nickerson” was on the mailbox, for God’s sake. Or, assuming Castro’s claim about lost property was sincere, he could have learned by any number of aboveboard means who occupied his former address.
“The houses around us, the streets and the sidewalks, the ground under our feet, they all feel so solid, like they always will be here, like they always have been,” Castro expounded. “But it was not so long ago, things were different, were they not?”
“I don’t see how this enters into your business here.” When had Dwight asked for an oration? Had he already allowed Castro an inch and ceded a mile?
As if affirming that worst fear, Castro took a slow, exasperating slurp from his tumbler. “This ground we walk on, for example, with the big houses and the neat yards on top of it. Underneath, for thousands of years, was a swamp here that festered and bred sicknesses and vermin. Even less than a hundred years ago, some swamp was around us. The English who first came, they named it Cat Swamp, and the street you call Olney now, it went to the swamp, and they called it Cat Swamp Trail. That swamp is all buried, but who can say it is gone forever?”
“Whether it is or it isn’t, every word of this is news to me,” Dwight retorted, loath to admit Castro had hit a nerve by reducing his exclusive neighborhood to malarial wetland. “Why should we trust this information?”
Castro shrugged impassively. “No one can be sure of how much history there is, even in one’s own backyard.”
“Well, maybe I see what you mean,” Edith ventured. “I heard there used to be a ravine where Elton Street is. But what does any of this have to do with whatever it is that belongs to you?”
“The ravine? Nothing to do with it, nothing.” Sly Castro winked. Yes, of course he was acting purposely obtuse. Not out to fool anybody. Just his little jest, okay?
“Okay, but why in the world,” asked Dwight despite wishing he could stop himself, despite misgivings that he was somehow chomping on bait, “was it called Cat Swamp?”
Castro raised his index finger and wagged it back and forth, as if to say, All in good time, my child. “It took a little while in front of your house to be sure you still had my thing of value. It will take a little while to relate how that thing of value came to be here.”
Oh God, please, just get on with it, Dwight inwardly fumed, regretting he’d ever peeked out the front window. A like sentiment was all too readable in Edith’s body language.
“In the beginning was a religious persecution, very long ago, but it is the first cause of my being here.” Castro indulged a generous swallow from his tumbler. “In Andalusia, the people had leave to worship as they pleased. But after the Moors were expelled, it became bad, too hard to stay, for those who did not profess the orthodox creed.”
Oh no, Dwight silently quailed, he’s not really dragging us all the way back to 1492, is he? But yes, he plainly was, and Dwight would have been fidgeting with irritation had he not been spacing out amidst Castro’s nonstop babble.
“The Inquisition and the wars about faith were to spread all over Europe. To be safe for the longest time, it was needful to join with the Portuguese, who were sailing to lands with no Christians, with no jealous gods. And what is now New England would be safest, even though the Portuguese had put up a church and a fort where your Newport is today, and sought to convert the Niantic people. But in a few years the soldiers and the priests went away, as anyone could have foretold they would, because the gold and the silver and the trade were elsewhere, and those passengers were soon forgotten who chose to stay and watch hurricanes and lightning hammer away at the fort. Nothing remains from those Portuguese builders except some of the church, visible at sea, and used by mapmakers as a landmark for generations before the Protestant colonies.”
Inexplicably to Dwight, the more Castro drank, the more polished his diction, the more educated and articulate his delivery, above and beyond simply warming to his topic.
“And so where the doctrine of the Catholics did not take root, another did, with precious decades to flourish unmolested, and to attract members from among the native men, and to receive those disciples from the Old World with the cunning to seek and find American refuge. For the sake of avoiding friction with the sachems and the shamans of that region, the newcomers retired to territory shunned as worthless and unlucky, a swamp in fact, north of the bay. There they could practice their rituals and libations in privacy, to curry the favor of divine powers sovereign over earth and sea and stars. Native leadership for the most part left these swamp dwellers in peace, unwilling to risk the displeasure of strange gods.”
Castro emptied the tumbler and set it gently on the parquet beside his chair. He had crossed the line between doddering and delusional, in Dwight’s confident opinion, and where would he go from there? Slipping out of earshot and phoning the police to remove this potential menace might have been the best plan, but then the babble resumed, and Dwight didn’t want to exit in the middle of a monologue and maybe set off their touchy powder keg. Wait till the next pause.
“Throughout this era, the only English to come ashore were fishermen who stayed in summer stations, and who had nothing for recreation but to drink and to seduce the native women. These seasonal visitors, and not the next century’s settlers, gave Cat Swamp its name, which was later thought to be from an abundance of cattails, or because bobcats prowled there, but no, it was because of the fishermen’s own cats that ran off and hid in the swamp, hunting mice and beetles.” Castro silently clapped his palms together, with fingertips leveled at Dwight. “And that is the answer I owed you, Mr. Nickerson, is it not?”
The best Dwight could do was nod helplessly, as if he had to keep his head above treacherous current, to the exclusion of almost everything else. A current of verbiage? Is that all it was? Edith was similarly glassy-eyed.
“The people of the swamp were happy to let the cats breed as they would, for they made acceptable offerings to those exalted, almighty powers, greedy for adoration. Much more pleasing to those powers was the blood of living men, which the fishermen also supplied when drunkenness made them easy marks, or when the furious kinfolk of a ravished native woman delivered them bound and naked. If entire boatloads of fishermen were to disappear, for the most part no one would miss them, and if someone did, where would blame ordinarily fall except upon the Atlantic?”
This crazy old coot, this demented story, it must be a hoax, Dwight reverted to telling himself. Staged by his boss, a send-up in lieu of a send-off, before tomorrow’s flight. Yeah, that’d be just like him. Any minute now, someone somehow, Castro, boss, or third party, would tip his hand.
“Mrs. Nickerson, you look especially upset about these past happenings. Would it help for me to assure you that fishermen and rapists and slavers were often the same people?”
Castro droned on without waiting for Edith’s yes or no. “Those first English colonists came here to escape persecution, even as we did, and those who built the first homes around the bay, and who were sometimes in earshot of our feline sacrifices, pretended deafness to them, in those days when the reputation of the cat was doubtful at best. Again you are upset, Mrs. Nickerson, but you must accept, your ancestors did not care what happened to cats.”
Castro’s hands were still clasping together and seemed to operate with a fidgety, independent volition of their own. They jerked a couple of inches back, forth, up, down at irregular intervals, as if obeying the skittish pull of the four compass points. Ever more annoying. If only Dwight could find the words to make him stop. At least Edith, bless her, had mustered the wherewithal to scoff, “Mr. Castro, do you really expect us to believe that Providence was founded by a coven of witches?”
“No, no, Mrs. Nickerson,” he patiently corrected her. “Witches are friendly to cats, remember? Most of your forebears also made that mistake. Almost none had the learning to perceive the ancient, enormous gulf between my religion and that of superstitious rustics. But those forebears of yours, as their numbers increased over the months and pushed inland, grew violently offended at what they glimpsed and overheard at the end of Cat Swamp Trail, and did oblige the swamp dwellers to quit their refuge of more than a century. In haste those victims of hatred had to scatter into the wilderness or secure passage to far-flung ports where none had knowledge of them or where the roads led to deathless masters who might enlarge their wisdom and impart how men and time might do them no further injury.”
Okay, Dwight pleaded, if there’s a man behind the curtain, it would be really good of him to pop out right now. The shiny black mantel clock ticked impassively on. Nope, nothing.
“Meanwhile, your forefathers, in their ignorant passion, strove to expunge my people not only from the land but from memory and the written word. Over the long run, that was also preferable to us, insulting as it was at the moment. Of those self-righteous witnesses, William Blackstone alone preserved a plain-spoken account of us in his journal, which fire destroyed along with the rest of his library, days after his death.”
“And that was never considered suspicious?” Dwight found himself asking.
“William Blackstone’s death was purely natural.” Maybe so, but Castro’s crooked smile was hardly innocent. Truth interposed as a wall of deception? “And Roger Williams, rumor had it, described us in some coded manuscripts, but they have never been deciphered. Perhaps he was libeling other neighbors altogether. Did you know his mortal remains turned into the root of an apple tree?”
What? Dwight was becoming disoriented, numb to the sofa beneath him as if his legs had fallen asleep up to the waist, or he was at the outset of a poor man’s out-of-body experience. “Mr. Castro, do you honestly believe that anything of yours is inside this house?” Dwight managed to ask. “Would you at least do us the courtesy of stating what it’s supposed to be? In one straightforward sentence?”
Castro’s smile had taken on a capricious edge. Or was it patronizing? His copper eyes, in contrast, had gone emotionless, borderline reptilian. “Hidden in the hinterlands of Cathay were the most accomplished teachers of my religion. In three lifetimes, a disciple could not grasp the fullness of wisdom in one of them.”
Castro’s hands, still acting on their own, were performing manipulations, tangentially like a game of cat’s cradle, except the shapes they wove, while fluttering apart and spiraling toward a contact they never quite achieved, induced a queasiness in Dwight, a foreboding, yet he lacked ambition to lower his gaze.
“One master too many in the disciplines of Cathay would have sown deadly, useless conflict, so after my intellect had penetrated to the innermost circle of secret lore, I withdrew, and eventually reached the haven of Louisiana bayou, where I could gather and teach acolytes in the seclusion of another swamp for yet more decades, until small-minded men enforcing human law drove us forth again. They caught me and nearly brought me to grief, but I tricked them by playing the mestizo degenerate they presumed I was, and when their guard was down, I escaped by the grace of my religious resources. Today you would call it ‘playing the race card,’ would you not?” An unpleasantness stole across Castro’s grin, as his hands danced on of their own profane accord.
“And when was that?” Edith was surprisingly naive to expect a straightforward answer from Castro now after so many deflected questions. Her hands were wrapped around the upright bottle of Edmundo Dantes in her lap, as they had been since she’d sat down.
“To have your nice bottle of rum, or any fermented beverage, would have been illegal then,” Castro disclosed.
“You mean to say you were alive in the 1920s?” How could he lie so blithely? How many years past a hundred would that make him?
Castro’s frown may have directed disappointment or condescension, but not sympathy, at Dwight’s dull wits.
“How long ago did you live in this house?” asked Edith when it became clear that Castro would not honor Dwight with a reply. Her tone was incurious, as if she spoke only to keep other questions at bay. Was her mind a scary leap or two ahead of Dwight’s?
“I have never lived in this house.”
To go by Edith’s blanching complexion, Castro, in that skewed way of his, had answered a question other than the one she had asked, one that she was afraid of asking. Nor did Castro’s hands relax in their manic, unseemly choreography. Why didn’t Edith prevail on Castro to leave off, as Dwight would have, had he been less preoccupied trying to concentrate?
“Let me get this straight,” Edith slowly enunciated. “You started referring to yourself, in this epic account of yours, as one of the fugitives from this swamp you alleged was here. You’re implying, in other words, that you’re more than four hundred years old?”
“No, not four hundred years, no.”
Petty or not, Dwight disliked how Castro was far more mild-mannered when “pretty” Edith guessed incorrectly. And since Castro liked her so much, why, he railed inwardly again, didn’t she insist he stop futzing with his hands?
Copper eyes grew brighter as if Dwight’s mute, unbecoming resentment were amusing. “During my sojourn in Cathay, I rambled among the Sichuan mountains and contemplated the archaic dawn sequoias there.” Castro had broken into a singsong chant, at a tenuous volume that obliged Dwight to lean forward, ears straining. Was this somehow Castro’s roundabout approach to revealing his age? “Those trees offered me food for thought on the origins of predacious flora. Sometimes I observed that flies and bees resting on the soft green platform of a frond had adhered to it, and then fused with it, dissolving into a wingless, glossy husk. Some enzymes in the needles, I inferred, had served inadvertently to trap and digest the insects. The chemical makeup of these trees, and the insects’ susceptibility to it, had conspired to make a carnivore of the sequoia, which benefited from this intake of animal protein.”
Dwight could do nothing but sit flummoxed, struggling to follow the breathy lecture. Deranged cultist was effectively impersonating a botanist, whatever the validity of his science. Moreover, his accent waned as his eloquence expanded. Curb a couple of diphthongs, and he could have anchored the evening news.
“Reproductive fitness, I realized, favored those individual plants that derived extra nutrients from prey, within those species endowed with the appropriate enzymes. Therefore certain species would exploit carnivory more and more, to the exclusion of their conspecifics that did not.”
Who or what, Dwight puzzled, was the real Castro? That was one riddle Edith couldn’t solve any better than he could, though between the extremes of rampant insanity and erratic brilliance, Dwight had to go with the first option, to label Castro a hopeless sociopath who talked a fantastically elaborate game. Trusting first impressions had always steered him safely away from troublesome characters before, and what was this scholarly discourse but a loony departure from equally loony historical fantasy?
“In common with spiders and many another predator, the earliest carnivorous plants needed a means of immobilizing victims while remaining passive themselves.” Castro fell silent as if his recital had reached its fit conclusion, and his hands, which had persevered in their enthralling, unwholesome gyrations, dropped limply to his lap.
The gleam in Castro’s eyes had subtly ignited along the ridges of his face until an exultant mask leered at Dwight and Edith. In conjunction, a musk had been invading Dwight’s nostrils, as if Castro, still dry as petrified wood, had been exuding a malodor of disguised excitement through channels other than atrophied sweat glands. It was acrid with longstanding piss and entrenched fungus, and with a whiff of partial spoilage, of arrested decay, like that of an elderly neighbor’s corpse he’d once had to ID at the chilly morgue. Dwight tried to slide back across the sofa, to withdraw a little from that nastiness, but he couldn’t budge. Stuck like a fly on a sequoia frond, as if subject to oblique power of suggestion, or was it something more, something in those weaving hands?
“At present,” Castro resumed, “I should think I need merely reaffirm the truth that has dawned upon you. In that benighted age before your streets and houses, this place was mine, and a sacred object of mine had to be concealed in haste beneath the water and mud of Cat Swamp. The followers and victims here were mine, the rituals were carried out under my guidance, and when those almighty powers that ravened among men before history return among them to end history, the triumph will be mine. I will be much greater in the future when the stars are right, but in that olden time, I was the King of Cat Swamp.”
“But what about us?” Edith’s formerly low, sultry drawl had coarsened, thickened, as if airways were clogged with swollen, uncooperative vocal muscles. “Why can’t we move?”
Castro bounced implausibly to his feet, brushed invisible specks off his shirtfront, and shrugged. Not a twinge of osteoporosis in his posture. “You are here where you say you belong. Why should you want to move ever again?” His placid smile was at odds with his pitiless copper focus.
“But what did we do to you?” Dwight also had to invest stubborn effort into eking out words, and they emerged malformed, gurgling.
“Mr. and Mrs. Nickerson, you are both proud of your distinguished ancestry, are you not? Of those who carved your towns from wilderness, as you like to put it, as if they simply daubed upon blank canvas? You are not, to look at you, different from your forebears who dispossessed the native peoples, and who dispossessed us. You might say that I am here to retrieve but a single token of what I have lost to you.”
“But how could we help whatever it was they did?” Dwight was nearly choking on each syllable. Uncanny that Castro understood him.
“Regardless of that, you are the beneficiaries of what they did, yes or no?” Castro’s smile had hardened to the grimness of his eyes. “Can you deny it? Can you stand up and dispute it? No? I thought not.”
“Please, we can help you. Whatever it is you’re after, let us get it for you.” The urgency in Edith’s strangled plea implied that she and Dwight were of one panicky mind: Castro meant for their paralysis to be terminal. “There must be something we can give you!”
“The devil has a hand in all bargains,” Castro admonished. “Let us not complicate this and involve him. I deal with someone else.”
Castro ambled over to Edith and twisted the bottle of Edmundo Dantes up and out of her two-handed grip, as if unscrewing a threaded stopper. Her fingers persisted in enclosing nothing. “My thanks to you once more, humoring an old man his taste. I never did say ‘when,’ you may recall. For nice rum like this you have no further use.”
Dwight heard Castro’s sandals cross the kitchen linoleum, and then the door to the back hall creaked wide, and then the sticky back door burst open, causing the whole house to tremble. Dwight next picked up Castro’s trail in the back yard, as framed by the picture window. Castro had a long-handled shovel from the garage and was digging in the shade, by amazing coincidence, of a young dawn sequoia, a housewarming present from his boss. With a flash of insight that passed just as readily for psychosis, Dwight pondered how well he really knew the boss. What was his religious affiliation, for instance?
Castro was laboring steadily in the terrific heat like an ox in its prime. Every so often he’d lodge Dwight’s shovel in the turf and savor a swig of rum, smacking his leathery lips. Not too late for the joke to be on Castro maybe. Dwight might have smirked had it not been such a chore. An hour ago the landscaping guys had sprayed the grass with chemicals that stayed toxic for three days. Too much to ask for a dose of modern suburbia to be this ancient fiend’s undoing? If the fiend’s unflagging vitality were any indication, then yes, it definitely was. Dwight watched and watched, with consistently sinking spirits. A gallon of pesticide might not faze Castro. But maybe he wasn’t even digging in the right spot. Yeah, that would serve him right. What had made him so cocksure about destroying that portion of Dwight’s cherished lawn, anyway?
Castro was chest-deep in his pit, surrounded by mounds of mingled sand and loam. He bent from view and straightened up, dammit, with something in his arms, something the girth of a hassock, and he hoisted it with tender care onto grass already smothering under loose soil. Whatever had led him to the front door had performed unerringly up to the last square foot. He reverently wiped clods and smears of dirt off his artifact with a handkerchief, which allowed Dwight to see it was made of greenish stone, though he couldn’t otherwise make head or tail of it. And to think, it had been under his lawn almost four hundred years.
Castro flattened his palms on the grassy perimeter, hoisted himself out of the hole, clapped his hands free of grime and ineffectual lawn poisons, drained and chucked the Edmundo Dantes, and, incredibly, hefted and hugged his prize to his chest with one spindly arm. With no intention, evidently, of tidying up over there. He hove toward the back door and out of sight again, to reenter Dwight’s field of vision in the living room. The greenish bulk and Castro’s white sleeve bisecting it were briefly all that Dwight could see, but proximity afforded no aid to comprehension. Here was a block of masonry or a squat statue, but of what? There were wings and claws and tentacles and eyes, disjointed, asymmetrical, out of proportion to each other, like an optical illusion set in some unfamiliar mineral, or like a mess on the floor at closing time in a sinister butcher’s shop.
After Castro had exited, Dwight spent a futile while fixated on reconciling those disparate body parts to each other. He didn’t snap out of it till a car door slammed in front of the house and an engine revved and soon receded. Shit, it sounded like his boss’s Explorer. He then belatedly glimpsed in peripheral vision that Edith was gone.
Dwight was reminded of a laughable scene in a movie back at college. An old movie, nowhere as old as Castro, but old enough to be silent, and it was German. In that memorably funny scene, a vampire picks up his own coffin and strolls around with it on one shoulder. Ridiculously or not, Castro had gone that German vampire one better, toting off a boulder plus Dwight’s wife. He would have felt more angst about her fate, had his own not been much closer at hand.
He and Edith were supposed to be on vacation. Mail and newspaper delivery had been canceled, the oblivious yard crew would come and go, and the Nickersons had warned friends and coworkers they’d be incommunicado for two weeks in paradise. Nobody would miss them. Nobody would ring the doorbell and worry.
Days and nights inched glacially by, in which Dwight soiled himself and then no longer soiled himself, hungered and thirsted and then no longer hungered and thirsted, shivered in the drafty central air and then went forever numb. Pangs and aches and every sensation wore out, just as Castro’s glands had done centuries ago. So did Dwight’s spite and indignation at being singled out, at the unfairness of Castro tracing that block of masonry to his backyard among all the equally deserving candidates for slow death in former Cat Swamp. He gradually gave up despising Edith, too, for making him let Castro inside in the first place. At last Dwight was down to one coherent nagging thought, recurring to him more and more rarely, that after a certain unremembered number of days, the ravages of starvation were irreversible.
He was in no shape to acknowledge, or to appreciate the aptness of it, when a scruffy feral tom stole in through the back door Castro had carelessly left open, and began spraying the drapes and scratching up the upholstery, and in general behaving like one more previous owner come home. Dwight didn’t even hear the crash when the cat bumped the Erté bust off its pedestal.