I can’t, Danny.
Danny heard something that sounded like laughing, or at least other people. Was it the graduate students? Were they all in the room together?
Danny: Please, Howard. There’s got to be a way. Belt me, kick me across the fucking room. I don’t care, just wake me up.
More noise. Definitely it was laughing, Howard too. Missed that one, Danny. Come again?
Danny’s teeth were clamped together. Please. Wake me up.
Oh, I can’t, buddy. This is too much fun.
What?
I’m enjoying this. Tell me what it’s like, Danny. Tell me everything. How does it feel to be scared out of your mind with no one to help you?
The cold hit Danny in a body shock, a squirt of fear that was the same as what he’d felt in the garden—something bad around him, nearby him. And Danny knew what it was: Howard.
It was all Howard.
Please, Danny whispered, his eyes shut tight. Help.
You want help? More laughter. C’mon, buddy. I’m nice, but not that nice.
Please.
The mint was strong in Danny’s face—Howard must be leaning close. Danny felt the heat coming off his cousin’s skin. Drops of someone’s sweat fell on his cheeks and eyelids. Howard’s voice seemed to come from inside Danny’s ear.
You’re scared? You want my help? That’s a lot to ask, you cold fucker. You vicious sonofabitch.
Danny shrieked and opened his eyes. He was standing by the pool. It was a pool again, thousands of raindrops tapping on its surface. Rain ran from Danny’s hair down over his face. And having things back to normal brought back the rational part of him that had been on ice for a while now, erased by his fear: It was all a dream, even Howard was part of the dream. This is real. This rain, this pool. Nothing but this.
Then thunder exploded and lightning broke the sky, and the terror clamped on Danny again. He started to run, bolted blind through the cypress and dove into the underbrush, stumbling through twigs that snapped back, scratching his face, raking his skin. He tripped over a root and landed face-first, a brassy taste of dirt filling up his mouth. Now the rain was pounding Danny, soaking his bandages until they were heavy on his head, gushing into his eyes and nose so he choked on it. But Danny kept running even if running made no sense. That was the one thing every part of him agreed on—running made no sense—but he was too scared to stop. There was a riot inside Danny’s head, the spooked and rational parts of him fighting it out in a way most of us would recognize, except it didn’t happen like I’m going to write it, piece by piece like a conversation. It was a knot, a confusion, a chaos in Danny’s head:
He brought me here to torture me. To punish me.
Don’t believe it. This is the worm.
He’s hated me all his life.
You’re letting in the worm. Don’t!
He wants me to die.
Shut it out—if you push it back you can still keep it out.
He wants me to lose my mind. This whole thing is a setup to make me lose my mind.
Bullshit. Bullshit. You’re losing it on your own, you’re making all this happen on your own.
From the very beginning it was him. Maybe even falling out the window—maybe that was him.
Impossible crap and you know it.
Now my brain is damaged, there’s something wrong with my brain. It’s the gripping sleep, the grabbing sleep.
It’s the worm.
The graduate students are in on it, too.
The worm.
And Mick and Ann—they all want to wipe me out.
You’re pulling that worm inside you. You’re sucking it in. It’s a choice. You’re making this happen.
I need to get away from here. Away from the castle.
That’s not going to solve a thing.
I’ll run away. I’ll get a plane back to New York. All I can do now is try to get out alive.
There’s no place to go. The worm is inside you, Danny. It’s in you.
Help!
Help yourself.
Help! Help! Danny hollered this out, screamed it into the night, as he stumbled toward the castle through the rain.
Danny got out by climbing over a broken wall—the same one he’d climbed from the outside to look at the view on his first night. Obviously there were better ways to exit the castle, but finding one of those would mean asking someone, and no way did Danny want Howard to know he was leaving.
He left behind most of his stuff. Taking it with him would be slow, not to mention obvious. When he walked out the door of his room the next day his clothes were still in the big medieval dresser and the Samsonite was empty in the closet. All Danny brought along was a shoulder bag stuffed with three pairs of underwear, two extra shirts, deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, hair mousse (optimistic, since his head was still bandaged), and socks. In his jacket pocket he had his passport, three hundred bucks, and one working credit card with about five hundred left on it. Somehow, that combination was going to have to get him back to New York.
Now I should back up here, because quite a few hours have passed since Danny was getting rained on out in the garden, and someone’s got to be wondering: (1) Was he ever really outside, or was it all just a dream? (2) Has he seen Howard since he got back (or dreamed he got back) to the castle? (3) Which part of Danny won the argument, the part that blamed everything on Howard or the part that blamed the worm? And I wish I knew how to sprinkle these answers around so you’d get the information without even noticing how you got it, but I don’t. So I’ll just stick them in when the time seems right.
Danny headed down the hall between the rows of electric candles. He was careful to walk, not hobble [Answer number 1: It wasn’t all a dream, because the only footwear Danny had to his name was one left boot and one right sandal (he must’ve dropped the other sandal while he was running), which meant he had been outside, not in his bed. Which also meant Howard hadn’t really been sitting by Danny’s bed making nasty comments into his ear. But to Danny, finding this out didn’t change much of anything. It was like dreaming you’ve fucked someone and not being able to look at them the next day: Danny saw Howard a different way. It made him get what he should have gotten from the very start: that Howard’s niceness, his reasons for bringing Danny over here, were too good to be true—were bullshit. A cover-up for something else.], in case someone saw him, although it was noon, and pretty soon everyone would be heading into the great hall to eat some tomatoey thing with plenty of garlic that Howard had been cooking all morning. It smelled unbelievably good.
Danny passed a big gold mirror, but he avoided looking in it. He was wearing a sock under his sandal to keep stuff from touching his toes, but he had a hatred of how sandals looked with socks and some pretty strong beliefs about the kind of loser who wore sandals with socks, so he wasn’t especially keen to see he’d become that kind of loser himself. Not to mention the way he must look from the neck up. Danny knew it was bad from the expression on Howard’s face. [Answer number 2: Howard came into his room that morning at around six with the bearded guy who’d given Danny the injection. Howard smiled at Danny (who was lying in bed wide awake) from the doorway and then the smile froze on his face and he charged over.
Howard: What the fuck happened in here?
Danny: Nothing happened.
Howard: Your face is all cut up.
If Danny didn’t know what he knew—that Howard had brought him over here to mess with his head—he would have bought this act completely because it was fantastic. A virtuoso performance of being worried. (Answer number 3, sorry to stick this one smack in the middle of number 2 but that’s where it fits: The voices in Danny’s brain went back and forth on who his real enemy was, Howard or the worm. The debate came down to this:
Howard.
The worm.
Howard.
The worm. until Danny reached a kind of frenzy and it all started running together: Howard The worm Howard The worm Howard The worm and finally: Howardt
hewormHowardthewormHowardtheworm. And that glob of words gave Danny his answer. The loop collapsed: it wasn’t Howard or the worm, Howard was the worm. They weren’t opposites, they were one thing, one evil terrifying thing that had waited years to catch up with him. And Danny had felt it there. All that time he’d sensed it waiting—even named it—without ever knowing who it was.)
Danny: I couldn’t sleep, so I went outside to get some air.
Howard: You went outside? Are you crazy, Danny? Did I not explain what kind of—
He stopped. He took a long breath and ran his hands through his hair. His voice got quiet and angry: I knew I should have slept in here. I knew it. Doc, look at this. He went outside last night and look what happened to him.
Danny: Relax, Howard. It’s a few scrapes.
Howard stared at him wild-eyed. You don’t get it, Danny. I must not’ve explained this right. You have a—ah, fuck it. He sat down heavily on the chair by Danny’s bed.
The doctor came over and took Danny’s head between his small cool hands.
Howard: He’s here to change your bandages. Which look like shit, by the way.
Danny: They got rained on.
Howard shook his head. The doctor went straight to work, unwrapping the bandages from Danny’s head and lifting them away, scattering water and blood and pus, with a pair of tongs. Howard stood close, watching every move. Judging from his expression, it wasn’t pretty.
Howard: Is he…okay?
The doctor said something Danny couldn’t understand. Howard gestured at Danny’s head and spoke louder. Is he okay, Doctor? Should it—should it look like that?
Doctor: Ya, ya. Is okay.
The doctor squeezed some ointment from a tube over the top of Danny’s head and tapped it down with his bare fingers. Danny felt the pressure of the doctor’s hands on his skull, but not his scalp. It was too numb. The doctor wrapped a fresh white bandage around the top half of Danny’s head. For some reason, it hurt less after that.]
One of the graduate students was supposed to bring Danny lunch, which gave him an hour, maybe more, before anyone would notice he was gone, and another hour at least before they figured out he’d left the castle. It was more than enough time, but Danny walked as fast as he could without stumbling. The only advantage he had was that Howard didn’t know he’d seen through his act, and Danny had to hold that lead. He went to the garden and followed the inside of the wall to the broken part he’d climbed before, clawed his way over, then tracked the wall back to the front of the castle and turned down a path he figured had to lead into town. This escape energized Danny. His mind was sharp and his fear was under control. The worm had gotten inside him, no question, but Martha was safe in the keep. When Danny thought of her, he felt a glow near his heart.
The climb down was longer and steeper than he remembered. Danny did it in a kind of trance, and eventually there were cobblestones under his feet. When he looked back at the castle it was two or three miles away. He had no idea he’d walked that far.
He remembered this town as a place with no color, but as he headed toward the central square the brightness of everything hurt his eyes: red roofs, leafy trees, kids dashing around in stripes, dogs that looked like they’d just climbed out of a bubble bath. Crisp hills, blue sky. The castle was on the tallest hill, gold in the sunlight.
Danny had one goal: a ticket back to Prague on the same mountain train he’d taken to get here. And a secondary, optional goal (if he happened to see a travel agency): a plane ticket back to New York. He tried not to think about how insane he’d been to accept a one-way ticket from Howard. That alone should have tipped him off.
There were red benches around the square, and an older guy with a monkey in his arms was sitting on one. Danny sat next to him. The monkey was small, covered with soft pale fur. His pink-brown face looked somewhere between an ancient man and a newborn baby. The monkey’s owner offered Danny a hazelnut. Danny smiled and shook his head, but the guy kept smiling back at him and offering Danny the nut until he realized the guy wanted him to feed the monkey. Embarrassed, Danny took the nut and handed it over. The monkey took it in his long dry fingers and turned it slowly. Finally he cocked his head and started taking small bites, keeping his round dark eyes on Danny. The monkey’s face had more emotions than a human’s: curiosity, pity, exhaustion, like he’d already seen too much. Danny had to look away.
Eight or nine boys were kicking a ball through the square. They were excellent players, even the littlest ones. Danny didn’t think much about his own soccer days anymore, but once in a while he’d remember something from that time: the smell of crushed-up grass or how the sky looked when he would walk home after practice, a strip of rust above the houses, then neon blue edging into black. Coming home in the almost dark made him feel grown up—a taste of grown-up life. Looking back, that seemed like one of the best parts of being a kid.
Danny felt a kind of heaviness coming on him. He said goodbye to the monkey man and hauled himself off the bench. He followed one of the narrow streets that tilted up the hill. Every shop had something nice laid out in its window: fish, bread, wine. It all looked cleaned up and polished to a point that seemed abnormal, like today was a holiday. Danny asked a lady selling flowers where the train station was, but she smiled and shook her head. She didn’t understand. She pointed up the street to a store with a wood clock hanging outside it on a hook. Inglee, inglee, she said, still smiling.
Danny smiled too. Good. Perfect. Thank you.
The shop was cool and dusty and smelled like clocks. There was a faint sound of ticking, not one tick but a thousand different ticks overlapping. A guy with pale greased hair combed back over his head smiled up at Danny from a table covered with little parts of clocks. Danny smiled back. His face was starting to hurt from so much smiling.
Danny: Do you speak English?
Clock man: A little bit.
Fantastic. I’m trying to find the train station.
No train here. Next town. And he said some mouthful of a name that sounded like Scree-chow-hump.
Danny: Whoa, wait a minute. I took a train here, to this town, a few days ago. So there’s got to be a train station here.
The man smiled: No train here. Train in Scree-chow-hump.
Danny stared at the guy. Was this a different town from the one he’d arrived in? Were there two towns near the castle?
Danny: Can I walk to Scree-chow-hump?
The man’s eyes moved over Danny. Walk? Is too far, I think.
Okay, Danny said. So he was in a different town. Which made sense, because nothing about this town was like the town where he’d waited for the bus. He’d ended up in the nice town instead of the shitty town, but the problem was that the train only stopped in the shitty one.
Danny: Bus? Can I take a bus to Scree-chow-hump? Or a bus to Prague? That would be the best.
Prague, no. Bus for Scree-chow-hump, of course. The man went to one of maybe fifty clocks stuck to the wall and moved the hands to 8:00.
Danny: Tonight?
No. The man made a rolling motion.
Tomorrow? One bus, all day?
One bus only.
At eight in the morning.
Yes. Eight.
Not eight at night….
No.
That’s absolutely ridiculous! What the fuck is the matter with you people? His voice slammed the walls of the tiny shop, and Danny shut up. He sounded like a maniac. But the clock guy had no reaction, the smile was still on his face. In the quiet Danny heard that crazy ticking and it made him desperate, like a bomb was about to go off.
Man: The people of Scree-chow-hump, we don’t like them. And they don’t…he gestured at his own chest.
Danny: They don’t like you. The people in the towns don’t like each other?
Yes! Heh-heh! We don’t—yes!
Okay. Danny shut his eyes. All right. And what about…is there a travel agent around here? You know, travel agent? Travel…agent! He was getting loud again, he c
ouldn’t help it. The clock guy kept smiling, but Danny picked up a vibration of anxiety under the smile. The guy was scared of him. Scared of Danny! What the fuck.
Suddenly the man nodded like he understood. He got up and led Danny to the door by one arm, gesturing up the street. Danny headed off in that direction, but there was nothing like a travel agency. The guy must’ve been trying to get rid of him. The street ended in a turn, and Danny lurched around it and found himself heading back toward the square. He took another street and followed it away from the square, but a few minutes later—boom—he was back again. This happened no matter where he went.
Danny saw a wooden globe hanging on a hook outside a shop, and he rushed over there thinking Bingo, a travel agent. But it was antiques. He didn’t even bother to go in, just looked through the window at a huge wooden arrow thing that must have been a longbow. And while he looked, light hit the window in a way that made his reflection jump out at him from the shiny glass: bandaged head, mismatched feet, a face that looked like someone had whacked it with a baseball bat and then raked it with a fork. It was a godawful sight, painful to look at, but Danny couldn’t take his eyes away. Who was this guy? He looked disturbed, like a person who shouldn’t be out in the world, a guy Danny would avoid on the street. It was only when he focused on what was behind the glass (big antique hunting knives with ivory handles) that the picture disappeared.
Some kind of afternoon siesta was starting up, and the streets were thinning out. Danny followed the road back to the square. The monkey man was gone. He sat on the empty bench and looked up at the castle, which made a black shadow over the hill below it. He felt confused, pissed off: he’d expected to be heading out of town by now, or at least waiting at the train station with a ticket in his hand. Instead he was looking up at Howard’s castle with no frigging idea what to do next. He remembered what the baroness said: The town and the castle have served each other for hundreds of years. As long as Danny was still in this town, he was under Howard’s thumb. And wouldn’t you know, he couldn’t seem to get out.
Something moved in Danny’s gut: the worm, eating. How powerful was that telescope in the castle’s kitchen window? Could Howard be using it right now to watch Danny struggle and come up short? The idea made his heart pitch. Danny looked around at the square lined with perfect shops, the sausages hanging in windows, the café with its blue umbrellas open, and wondered if any of it was real. Could it all be a setup made by Howard to distract him, to complicate the game of watching Danny flail around and get nowhere?