The Keep (2 page)

When they were teenagers, Howie changed—
overnight
was what everyone said. He had a
traumatic experience
and his sweetness drained away and he turned moody, anxious, always wiggling a foot and muttering King Crimson lyrics under his breath. He carried a notebook, even at Thanksgiving it was there in his lap with a napkin on it to catch the gravy drips. Howie made marks in that book with a flat sweaty pencil, looking around at different family members like he was trying to decide when and how they would have to die. But no one had ever paid much attention to Howie. And after the change, the
traumatic incident,
Danny pretended not to.

Of course they talked about Howie when he wasn’t there, oh yeah. Howie’s troubles were a favorite family topic, and behind the shaking heads and
oh it’s so sad
s you could hear the joy pushing right up through because doesn’t every family like having one person who’s fucked up so fantastically that everyone else feels like a model citizen next to him? If Danny closed his eyes and listened hard he could still pick up some of that long-ago muttering like a radio station you just barely hear:
Howie trouble drugs did you hear he was arrested such an unattractive boy I’m sorry but can’t May put him on a diet he’s a teenager no it’s more than that I have teenagers you have teenagers I blame Norm for pushing adoption you never know what you’re getting it all comes down to genes is what they’re learning some people are just bad or not bad but you know exactly not bad but just exactly that’s it: trouble.

Danny used to get a weird feeling, overhearing this stuff when he came in the house and his mom was talking on the phone to one of his aunts about Howie. Dirt on his cleats after winning a game, his girlfriend Shannon Shank, who had the best tits on the pom squad and maybe the whole school all set to give him a blow job in his bedroom because she always did that when he won, and thank God he won a lot.
Hiya, Mom.
That square of purple blue almost night outside the kitchen window. Shit, it hurt Danny to remember this stuff, the smell of his mom’s tuna casserole. He’d liked hearing those things about Howie because it reminded him of who
he
was, Danny King,
suchagoodboy,
that’s what everyone said and what they’d always said but still Danny liked hearing it again, knowing it again. He couldn’t hear it enough.

That was memory number one. Danny sort of drifted into it lying there under the tree, but pretty soon his whole body was tensed to the point where he couldn’t lie still. He got up, swiping twigs off his pants and feeling pissed off because he didn’t like remembering things.
Walking backward
was how Danny thought of that and it was a waste of valuable resources anywhere, anytime, but in a place he’d spent twenty-four hours trying to escape to it was fucking ridiculous.

Danny shook out his coat and pulled it back over his arms and started walking again, fast. This time he went right. At first there was just forest around him, but the trees started thinning out and the slant under his feet got steeper until Danny had to walk with his uphill leg bent, which sent splinters of pain from his knee to his groin. And then the hill dropped away like someone had lopped it off with a knife and he was standing on the edge of a cliff with the castle wall pushed right up against it, so the wall and the cliff made one vertical line pointing up at the sky. Danny stopped short and looked over the cliff’s edge. Below, a long way down: trees, bushy black with a few lights packed deep inside that must be the town where he’d waited for the bus.

Alto: he was in the middle of frigging nowhere. It was extreme, and Danny liked extremes. They were distracting.

If I were you, I’d get a cash deposit before I started asking people to spelunk.

Danny tilted his head back. Clouds had squeezed out the stars. The wall seemed higher on this side of the castle. It curved in and then back out again toward the top, and every few yards there was a narrow gap a few feet above Danny’s head. He stood back and studied one of these openings—vertical and horizontal slits meeting in the shape of a cross—and in the hundreds of years since those slits had been cut, the rain and snow and what have you must have opened up this one a little bit more. Speaking of rain, a light sprinkling was starting that wasn’t much more than a mist, but Danny’s hair did a weird thing when it got wet that he couldn’t fix without his blow dryer and a certain kind of mousse that was packed away in the Samsonite, and he didn’t want Howie to see that weird thing. He wanted to get the fuck out of the rain. So Danny took hold of some broken bits of wall and used his big feet and bony fingers to claw his way up to the slot. He jammed his head inside to see if it would fit and it did, with just a little room to spare that was barely enough for his shoulders, the widest part of him, which he turned and slid through like he was sticking a key in a lock. The rest of him was easy. Your average adult male would’ve needed a shrinking pill to get through this hole, but Danny had a certain kind of body—he was tall but also bendable, adjustable, you could roll him up like a stick of gum and then unroll him. Which is what happened now: he unraveled himself in a sweaty heap on a damp stone floor.

He was in an ancient basementy place that had no light at all and a smell Danny didn’t like: the smell of a cave. A low ceiling smacked his forehead a couple of times and he tried walking with his knees bent, but that hurt his bad knee too much. He held still and straightened up slowly, listening to sounds of little creatures scuttling, and felt a twist of fear in his gut like someone wringing out a rag. Then he remembered: there was a mini-flashlight on his key chain left over from his club days—shining it into somebody’s eyes you could tell if they were on E or smack or Special K. Danny flicked it on and poked the little beam at the dark: stone walls, slippery stone under his feet. Movement along the walls. Danny’s breath came quick and shallow, so he tried slowing it down. Fear was dangerous. It let in the
worm:
another word Danny and his friends had invented all those years ago, smoking pot or doing lines of coke and wondering what to call that thing that happened to people when they lost confidence and got phony, anxious, weird. Was it
paranoia? Low self-esteem? Insecurity? Panic?
Those words were all too flat. But the
worm,
which is the word they finally picked, the worm was three-dimensional: it crawled inside a person and started to eat until everything collapsed, their whole lives, and they ended up getting strung out or going back home to their folks or being admitted to Bellevue or, in the case of one girl they all knew, jumping off the Manhattan Bridge.

More walking backward. And it wasn’t helping, it was making things worse.

Danny took out his cell phone and flipped it open. He didn’t have international service, but the phone lit up, searching, and just seeing it do that calmed Danny down, like the phone had powers—like it was a Forcefield Stabilizer left over from Terminal Zeus. True, he wasn’t connected to anyone right at that second, but in a general way he was so connected that his connectedness carried him through the dry spells in subways or certain deep buildings when he couldn’t actually reach anyone. He had 304 Instant Messaging usernames and a buddy list of 180. Which is why he’d rented a satellite dish for this trip—a drag to carry, an airport security nightmare, but guaranteed to provide not just cell phone service but wireless Internet access anywhere on planet earth. Danny needed this. His brain refused to stay locked up inside the echo chamber of his head—it spilled out, it overflowed and poured across the world until it was touching a thousand people who had nothing to do with him. If his brain wasn’t allowed to do this, if Danny kept it locked up inside his skull, a pressure began to build.

He started walking again, holding the phone in one hand, the other hand up in the air so he’d know when to duck. The place felt like a dungeon, except somehow Danny remembered that dungeons in old castles were usually in the tower—maybe that was the tall square thing he’d seen from the wall with the red light on top: the dungeon. More likely this place had been a sewer.

If you ask me, mother earth could use a little mouthwash.

But that wasn’t Danny’s line, that was Howie’s. He was heading into memory number two, I might as well tell you that straight up, because how I’m supposed to get him in and out of all these memories in a smooth way so nobody notices all the coming and going I don’t know. Rafe went first with the flashlight, then Howie. Danny came last. They were all pretty punchy, Howie because his cousins had singled him out to sneak away from the picnic, Danny because there was no bigger thrill in the world than being Rafe’s partner in crime, and Rafe—well, the beautiful thing about Rafe was you never knew why he did anything.

Let’s show Howie the cave.

Rafe had said this softly, looking sideways at Danny through those long lashes he had. And Danny went along, knowing there would be more.

Howie stumbled in the dark. He had a notebook under one elbow. They hadn’t played Terminal Zeus in more than a year. The game ended without talking—one Christmas Eve, Danny just avoided Howie and went off with his other cousins instead. Howie tried a couple of times to come near, catch Danny’s eye, but he gave up easily.

Danny: That notebook’s messing up your balance, Howie.

Howie: Yeah, but I need it.

Need it why?

For when I get an idea.

Rafe turned around and shined the flashlight straight at Howie’s face. He shut his eyes.

Rafe: What’re you talking about, get an idea?

Howie: For D and D. I’m the dungeon master.

Rafe turned the beam away. Who do you play with?

My friends.

Danny felt a little stunned, hearing that. Dungeons and Dragons. He had a kind of body memory of Terminal Zeus, the feel of dissolving into that game. And it turned out the game hadn’t stopped. It had gone on without him.

Rafe: You sure you’ve got any friends, Howie?

Aren’t you my friend, Rafe? And then Howie laughed and they all did. He was making a joke.

Rafe: This kid is actually pretty funny.

Which made Danny wonder if this could be enough—them being in the boarded-up cave where no one was allowed to go. If maybe nothing else would have to happen. Danny wished very hard for this.

Here’s how the cave was laid out: first a big round room with a little bit of daylight in it, then an opening where you had to stoop to get through into another room that was dark, and then a hole you crawled through into room three, where the pool was. Danny had no idea what was beyond that.

They all got quiet when they saw the pool: creamy whitish green, catching Rafe’s flashlight beam and squiggling its light over the walls. It was maybe six feet wide and clear, deep.

Howie: Shit, you guys. Shit. He opened up his notebook and wrote something down.

Danny: You brought a pencil?

Howie held it up. It was one of those little green pencils they gave you at the country club to sign your check. He said: I used to bring a pen, but it kept leaking on my pants.

Rafe gave a big laugh and Howie laughed too, but then he stopped, like maybe he wasn’t supposed to laugh as much as Rafe.

Danny: What did you write?

Howie looked at him: Why?

I don’t know. Curious.

I wrote
green pool.

Rafe: You call that an idea?

They were quiet. Danny felt a pressure building in the cave like someone had asked him a question and was getting sick of waiting for an answer. Rafe. Now wondering why Danny’s older cousin had so much power over him is like wondering why the sun shines or why the grass grows. There are people out there who can make other people do things, that’s all. Sometimes without asking. Sometimes without even knowing what they want done.

Danny went to the edge of the pool. Howie, he said, there’s a shiny thing down there at the bottom. You see it?

Howie came over and looked. Nope.

There, down there.

Danny squatted next to the pool and Howie did, too, wobbling on the balls of his big feet.

Danny put his hand on his cousin’s back. He felt the softness of Howie, how warm he was through his shirt. Maybe Danny had never touched his cousin before, or maybe it was just knowing right then that Howie was a person with a brain and a heart, all the stuff Danny had. Howie clutched his notebook against his side. Danny saw the pages shaking and realized his cousin was scared—Howie felt the danger pulling in around him. Maybe he’d known all along. But he turned his face to Danny with a look of total trust, like he knew Danny would protect him. Like they understood each other. It happened faster than I’m making it sound: Howie looked at Danny and Danny shut his eyes and shoved him into the pool. But even that’s too slow: Look. Shut. Shove.

Or just
shove.

There was the weight of Howie tipping, clawing arms and legs, but no sound Danny could remember, not even a splash. Howie must’ve yelled, but Danny didn’t hear a yell, just the sounds of him and Rafe wriggling out of there and running like crazy, Rafe’s flashlight beam strobing the walls, bursting out of the cave into a gush of warm wind, down the two big hills and back to the picnic (where no one missed them), Danny feeling that ring around him and Rafe, a glowing ring that held them together. They didn’t say a word about what they’d done until a couple hours later when the picnic was winding down.

Danny: Shit. Where the hell is he?

Rafe: Could be right underneath us.

Danny looked down at the grass. What do you mean, underneath us?

Rafe was grinning. I mean we don’t know which way he went.

By the time everyone started fanning out, looking for Howie, something had crawled inside Danny’s brain and was chewing out a pattern like those tunnels, all the ways Howie could’ve gone deeper inside the caves, under the hills. The mood was calm. Howie had wandered off somewhere was what everyone seemed to be thinking—he was fat, he was weird, there was no blood tie, and no one was blaming Danny for anything. But his Aunt May looked more scared than Danny had ever seen a grown-up look, a hand on her throat like she knew she’d lost her boy, her one child, and seeing how far things had gone made Danny even more petrified to say what he knew he had to say—
We tricked him, Rafe and me; we left him in the caves—
because that handful of words would change everything: they would all know what he’d done, and Rafe would know he’d told, and beyond that Danny’s mind went blank. So he waited one more second before opening his mouth, and then one more, another and another, and every second he waited seemed to drive some sharp thing deeper into Danny. Then it was dark. His pop put a hand on Danny’s head
(suchagoodboy)
and said, They’ve got plenty of people looking, son. You’ve got a game tomorrow.