Jake Depree and the Castle of Worms
written by: Andrew Buckner
@moviesforlife09
The chateau de vers, or the Castle of Worms, sat on a mountain of bodies and bones eaten by the title invertebrates in La Mort Valley, Paris, France. Inspired by the look and function of the Bastille, it was originally meant to house opulent, upper-class prisoners given “slap on the wrist” sentences, i.e. a length of a few days to months, for petty crimes such as pickpocketing or forgery. When the unwed, forty-year-old creator of the ten-tower, three-hundred-foot wide, one-hundred-and-fifty-foot deep behemoth, Jacque DuPont, was pecked to death by a murder of carrion crows just outside the entrance of the Castle of Worms at 10:10 a.m. on the eve of the day it was to open its doors and receive its first batch of prisoners, August 21, 1789, the general public immediately saw this as an evil omen. The building was then sold as a private residence to Louis de Clarmont who, on September 4th, 1790, just twenty-four hours after becoming the owner of the Castle of Worms, killed his wife, Juliette de Clarmont, and his five children with a dagger, which Louis was reported as saying “had a bloody mouth” and told him to kill. Louis was sentenced to hanging the next day.
Before the building was condemned and destroyed on January 1st, 1800, the next several owners of the Castle of Worms all claimed to find de Clarmont’s dagger, bloodstains from the murders it was a part of on the teeth of the blade, popping up in random places throughout the house. The owner after Louis, sixty-year-old Michel Auclair, said that the bloodstains would not wash off. He also claimed to have buried the blade in his backyard. At one time, he said he had thrown it into the local river, the Waters of the Castle of Worms (or, les eaux du chateau de verse as it was locally known). Minutes later, when he returned to the interior of the Castle of Worms, the blade would be back in his hand or somewhere on his person. Being without a family to slaughter, he killed himself to quench the dagger’s ravenous bloodlust.
With the acts of murder and violence that had taken place in the castle over the years, the public thought that demolishing the building would stop the madness that had occurred on the property. They were wrong. It set off a chain of events, a non-stop barrage of sudden massacres throughout Paris, that caused many to flee the area in fear of their lives. It wasn’t until the entirety of La Mort Valley was burned to the ground by French Revolutionaries that the killings related to the Castle of Worms ceased. Nonetheless, the whispered legends and old wives’ tales concerning the place only grew in size and in number. To this day, the mystique of these stories still draws tourists to the area, whose name was changed to vallee du soleil (or “sunshine valley”) on September 23rd, 1801, in droves.
So, it was out of sheer astoundment that the Castle of Worms suddenly stood before me, forty-year-old Jake Depree, in Lion’s Paw, Ohio two-hundred-and-thirty-five years after its creation in the middle of the usually crowded section of Main Street where I found myself on that rain-drenched, late-August morning in 2024. Thinking this unexpected vision was an anaphylactic reaction to the wasp sting that I received yesterday while watching my daughter’s horse riding lesson at Gentle Days Farms in Canfield, Ohio, my reaction was a long stare and an odd poke at the recently infected flesh, where rose a painful swelling that visibly erupted in a balloon-like fashion between my thumb and pointer finger, from the wasp attack. The headaches so crippling that they could only be equated to bombs exploding in between my ears and the equally overwhelming drowsiness caused by the sting were par for the course from my experience with such insect confrontations. But, hallucinations of buildings that weren’t even supposed to exist, let alone in this country or time period, had me well aware that the poison the wasp had placed in my system was actively affecting my brain.
Somehow finding the clarity of mind to park in the local Pizza Place parking lot and walk towards the castle in the middle of Main Street, I continuously looked left and right for traffic. Usually, the incessant blare of horns and obscenities accentuated by raised middle fingers from cars leapfrogging around one another were all part of the routine soundtrack of such a common scene. Nonetheless, no one else was in sight. I almost expected to see a tumbleweed roll past me and an instrumental Ennio Morricone track to play in the background, as if this were an old Sergio Leone spaghetti western, to punctuate both the solitude and the underlying intensity of the moment.
It wasn’t until I walked through the moat and got to the iron-barred entrance doors to the Castle of Worms that a horn blared in my ears. I turned my shoulder, looked, and saw an automobile-like shape about to crash into me. Right before impact, a blue burst of electricity surged through the potentially phantom image of both the car and the castle.
Suddenly, it felt like the world spun me on my head and twisted me back around. The gray skies and impending rain clouds turned unusually sunny, but more threatening than ever. Crows with bloody beaks surrounded and walked alongside me with an unblinking stare everywhere I stepped. Mud squished in between my strangely bare feet. It wasn’t long before I realized that I was now in a place of endless fascination for me over the past twenty-five years, La Mort Valley.
Then, a vision of radiance even more perplexing than my newfound surroundings gripped my senses. The Maiden of La Mort Valley, Justine de Edas, was suddenly trodding alongside me in a horse-drawn carriage. Stunning in a long-flowing silk and cotton dress and a white, flower-lined capote bonnet, I heard her ask me if I was “the building inspector” before my sky-blue iris could take in the dizzying heights of her beauty.
“Pardon me, ma’m?” I lamely asked as Justine stepped off the carriage with what looked like modern stiletto heels.
“Are you the building inspector?” she asked in the gentlest French accent I could’ve ever imagined.
At the time, what I found bizarre was that it was Justine who was following my steps from my right side in the same manner that the ominous crows were doing only moments ago. I found my eyes drifting from the gothic loveliness of Justine to the trees and general skyline with visions of the crows suddenly swooping down and attacking me like they once did Jacque DuPont all those years ago. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to realize that this French beauty, the “mistress” of DuPont and mother of his illegitimate children, who were all also killed by suddenly attacking crows on the one-year anniversary of the father of her children’s death, was speaking perfect English when she should only be able to speak French.
As Justine spoke, the swelling from the wasp sting in my right hand started again. Instinctively, I scratched the area. Looking down, I saw my fingernails peeling away layers of my own flesh. The itching only got worse. The strength of my scratching grew stronger the further into the swollen area my fingers tore into with their frantic fervor. Eventually, I saw the bone of my knuckle poking through the infected area.
Peering into the deepening wound, the bone became the Castle of Worms. I saw two shapes, Justine and I, laughing, smiling, and walking hand-in-hand into the castle. Justine was in a wedding dress. I was in my finest modern tuxedo. It didn’t take much to fill in the blanks: We had just gotten married.
As if someone were pressing fast forward on a video diary of our relationship memories, I heard her call me “Jacque” while making love on our wedding night. I then saw Jacque’s bony corpse fingers poking through my chest. I saw Justine’s belly grow pregnant with our quintuplet boys. I saw me tickling and kissing her stomach. I then saw Jacque’s skeletal head pop out of his chest. His rib cage became my rib cage. I felt stuck, immobile. It was as if I were buried alive in the mountain of bones atop the Castle of Worms. Then, I realized that I wasn’t in control. My thoughts of Justine and I and our relationship were Jacque’s memories. They were also his hopes of what might’ve been in another lifetime. All of which were reflecting through my own perspective.
“I’m dead. I’m buried. I’m being controlled,” something inside me echoed.
Was it true? Was it Jacque’s way of mocking me?
Having the mental strength to move my head back and away from the gaping abyss of raw gore and muscle that was once a small insect wound, I looked up at Justine. Maggots dropped from her fleshless eye sockets. Her body was all exposed bones. Tufts of her hair, thick with grass, worms, and dirt had landed by my feet. As if this were a natural state for her, Justine reached a bare arm out, wrapped her bony fingers around my wound, and asked “Are you the building inspector? I’m looking for a home, as the one I once had, had me permanently removed. Please tell me you are here to inspect the building. I’m looking for..” she started again, but I, knowing what she was going to say, spoke more out of instinct than forethought.
“I am. Are you, uh, homeless at the moment, ma’m?”
“Yes. You must help me. My children are starving. They already died once. They can’t die again! We can’t afford anything without their father, Jacque, around to care for us!”
With these words, Justine ripped open her chest, put her skeletal hands inside the area, moved her intestines around, and pulled out five blue-faced fetuses. All of them were moving their mouths as if they were sucking at their mother’s breast.
“The dagger,” something, perhaps Jacque, was telling me within. “You must search the interior of the premises, find wherever it may be hidden, and end this madness by pulling its bloodstained blade against your throat in an act of suicide. Then, the children and Justine can feast. They will live. They will have the strength to ward off the crows that are circling you now with their beady, murderous eyes and their vile intentions to feast upon you.”
Before I could mutter a word, a supernatural psychological rush, which I could only equate to the demonic first-person camera angle from the opening of Sam Raimi’s masterpiece, The Evil Dead, possessed my senses. I saw the Castle of Worms as if I were a bee, or some other type of small insect, flying through the open entrance door, glancing through the prison cell-like rooms on all sides of me throughout the entirety of the building, and being drawn to a palm-sized object hidden in the walls in a secret basement below the first floor.
Without pausing, I saw the ground breaking below me. I then felt the pain rising violently in my already swollen right hand from the impact of punching through the ground. Continuing to mind travel, I found myself steadily moving downward through the murky depths of the basement to where the red image glowed in the wall.
As if defying the anguish growing in my fist, I sent another powerful punch. This time it landed on the wall before me. As my right hand reached in, I felt the wet slickness my mind instantly equated with blood and murder, and quickly pulled out the dagger Louis de Clarmont used to kill his family. I felt an unholy violence rebirth my heart and my pulsing temples.
Before I could realize that I was springing backwards towards where I was before this hallucination, I opened my eyes to see Justine, guts still leaking from her stomach and with five bloody fetuses standing on their toes in a line around her and me, hand-in-hand with me and one of the fetuses. The long line of hands reached from one being to the next in an unbroken and unwavering way that potently symbolized familial strength.
“Dearest, Jacque,” Justine began with a voice as bursting with happiness as the ruddy warmth now spreading on her face, “Look at all we’ve done! You have returned! We can all be a happy family now! Perhaps you may propose marriage to me now so that we may be finally unified under the ever-watchful eye of God and I, your lover, your only romantic entanglement in this cruel world, may stop being so erroneously referred to as merely your ‘mistress’.”
“Mind travel back to the castle. Find the large queen’s mirror on the second floor. Look into it. You will see Jacque’s features peering back,” that same damnable inflection exploded within me.
Without knowing how I did it, or even feeling like I had a choice in the matter, I began to mind travel at a breakneck speed to the castle. It ended about as quickly as it began as the bony, fleshless arms of the bodies buried beneath the castle began reaching their arms upwards in reanimation. I felt my mouth drop. A gasp escaped my lips.
Before I could react to the situation, a skeleton with crows still pecking at the bones, which my mind told me was the remains of Jacque DuPont, rose before me, gripped my arms, which I peered down and saw were now fleshless, and pulled me beneath the dirt. Worms were writhing over my immobile frame. I felt them crawling over and eating me. There was a passing moment when I wanted to eat them “for survival,” as the now familiar voice in my brain instructed me to do.
There was a weight, that of the earth around me and Jacque holding me down, that kept me in place. I didn’t need to look in the queen’s mirror to be aware of the fact that I didn’t have eyes. Nonetheless, I was able to look to my right and see the still-moving skeleton of Justine, my ever-smiling wife (at least in this timeline), next to me. Something pushed my head to my left side, but I knew long before it moved in that direction what I was about to see: the five fetuses of the children the monster that was now controlling me slaughtered hundreds of years ago. The earth and all the worms undulating within it were slowly being thrown over my ever-immobile body. I tried to scream, but only silence came out.
“I didn’t think of the dagger in my hand until I was completely buried alive.”
“Why was it so imperative that I obtained this infernal dagger just to succumb to this ghastly fate?” I wondered.
As if in response, my body again began to move so quickly that it took my thought processes long seconds to catch up to the sudden spasms. The blade moved upwards, jabbing at the dirt. I was going to keep digging until light filled my vision. I was determined. With each twist of the dagger, I knew this coffin of dirt would not be my fate.
My right hand and back aching from the jabs, I felt the worms dropping on my face. A strange hunger arose for them. Yet, I shook it off. I stayed determined to free myself with the dagger.
After an agonizing, indeterminate amount of time, the earth above me cracked open enough that I could rise and free myself from my premature burial. As I did so, visions of the skeletons poking out from underneath the Castle of Worms exploded in my skull.
Standing upwards, spine crying out in agony as I did so, I saw the horse from the carriage Justine was riding when I first entered this world being pulled down into the ground. A look of stunned shock widened the mare Percheron’s almond eyes. Panic rising, she tried to flee. Before it could do so, a mass of zombie skeletons exploded, thirteen in total, from the earth below.
They pulled the horse down into the earth further and further while ripping it to bloody ribbons. Within the passage of seconds, all that was left was the now abandoned carriage.
Cackling among themselves, the skeletons soon jumped into the carriage box. The few skeletons that made it to the carriage box made whiplike motions with the reins while the others acted like horses trying to pull the carriage.
Seeing me watching them after a long moment, the skeletons stopped their literal horseplay. They frantically rushed my way. It was more like they were the sprinting zombies of an early 21st-century horror film as opposed to the beloved, leisurely ghouls that were found in the brilliant cinematic offerings of the director of Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, and Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero.
Instinctively, I jumped back into the dirt coffin I was still standing in and tried to rebury myself.
That’s when a sudden burst, like a firework or gunshot, sent all living and reanimated beings on the premises to stop and stare in awe. The sound came from the Castle of Worms. Without any sense of fanfare, it imploded.
A burst of glass from the queen’s mirror burst in my mind as this scene commanded my senses. From herein, all the ghosts that were imprisoned in the cell-like rooms of the castle were unleashed.
Realizing that this was not a mere hallucination or premonition of upcoming events, but actually what was transpiring inside the Castle of Worms at that precise moment, the newly liberated specters flew towards, attacked, and controlled me before I could understand what was happening.
“But, the prison was never used in its intended way. How can the rooms be filled with ghosts? Have I entered another timeline? Perhaps one where the castle was used in its intended manner,” I pondered.
Before an answer could arise, I felt the memory of metal crashing into me and tires pummeling over me. I heard the electric beeping of an EKG machine to my right. The distinct sound it made triggered visions of a confining, claustrophobic hospital room to immediately spiral into my brain. When my eyes cracked open, they confirmed my hypothesis about my new location.
White bandages and pain sprawled throughout my back. My head once again felt like a bomb had gone off in its interior. I tried to move both my legs and my arms. Neither worked. I knew within a moment that these bony fragments, which I might’ve used to escape if I were back in the Castle of Worms, were broken.
“This is so you can’t escape,” Jacque’s voice exploded within me.
Instinctively looking from right to left for the source of the voice, because it sounded like it was in my ear as much as it was in my brain, I then realized I was strapped to a gurney. Just as spontaneously, I pulled my arms upwards, as if trying to free myself before fully comprehending my prisoner-like predicament, and felt the sharp ends of glistening handcuffs tying me to the tubular aluminum frame of the pram.
After several violent jolts to break free of the handcuffs, I rocketed backwards onto the bed. I tried to relax, breathe, and think logically. Yet, the horror of my situation became evermore dire when I, inexplicably, saw the queen’s mirror from the Castle of Worms above me. I was another copy of the marauding, long-buried, murderous fiends that had risen from the earth around the Castle of Worms. I was a fleshless skeleton as uniform as the brutes who had chased me from Justine’s horse-drawn carriage.
As if this thought related to my bride on some bygone, possibly hallucinated timeline were a summoning cue, a nurse who looked like a modernized version of Justine pushed me down onto the gurney. I tried to look at her name tag. I could barely make out a “J-U”. Before I could get further she pulled out Louis’ eternally bloodstained dagger and hovered it over my exposed ribs.
“Because of the great sacrifice of your fleshy form in the new late-1700’s timeline for our dear castle,” Justine began with a bit of a Southern pluck added to her hauntingly familiar voice, “Your body has been buried well over two hundred years in the past in the old burial grounds near the Castle of Worms. Since the portal to the original timeline only opens in random places every two-hundred-and-thirty-five or so years, it’s safe to say that you will be in your current form for quite some time. Because of your great sacrifice, ole’ Jakey boy, the Castle of Worms can now take up residence right where you found it when our wonderful journey began: in the middle of Main Street.”
“No, no,” was all I was able to utter before I eventually spat out, “There’s too much traffic. Too many people. There will be….accidents.”
“No, Jakey, my love,” Justine said as she raised the dagger in the air as if she were about to violently stab me in the throat I no longer had. “The evil, the bad omens, the ghosts from the castle have already escaped. They have possessed all of your beloved neighbors, teachers, and commonplace nobodies in Lion’s Paw and made them kill one another. That is why we needed you to sleep for a while. That is why we needed you to go on your little side quest: so they could complete their mission.”
“I don’t believe it,” I screamed and fought the bounds holding my bony arms and legs together feebly one more time, “You wouldn’t do it!”
Suddenly, the glass from the mirror above me turned into a television screen. Visions of familiar neighbors and friends, all savagely stabbed bodies, piled upon one another caught my gaze. The screen pulled away. All of this violence had occurred in the Pizza Place parking lot where I parked my car before this gale of madness swept me into its furious grasp. My 21st-century family (at least in this timeline)–my wife, Janice, and my five children, Joey, Jeremiah, Jacqueline, Jake Jr., and Janine–were the first ones I saw among the bodies on the mirror/television screen.
Sobs of anguish choked my throat. I wanted to weep for them, but I had no eyes. I wanted to scream for them, but I had no mouth. I could only remain motionless and inaudible.
“Now, all we need from you so that we can bury it in the grounds of this revitalized, 21st-Century Castle of Worms, where you will forever remain our test experiment, our guinea pig, our prisoner, and be locked in this room on the tenth-tower of the castle forever, is your still-beating heart.”
Before I could speak a word, the dagger hit my heart. I felt my ribs twisting and an ear-splitting screech which reminded me of the gurney wheels just below my frame as Justine pulled the fist-like organ out of my chest. If I had eyes, I would say she held it in front of my eyes.
“Thank you, my dear, for your sacrifice,” Justine said with a batting of the sockets where her eyelashes should be and a hurried thrust of the heart out the window.
From the mirror/ television screen, I saw my heart land on the castle burial grounds. It rolled for a few feet. Then, it stopped suddenly and something pulled it under. The sound of doors locking haunted my ears. It took no time at all to realize that these were the now operable prison cell doors locking every prisoner, including me, into their rooms for eternity.
Then, an explosive pain radiated throughout my right hand. Thinking of my wasp sting, I looked down and saw gory bits from the ruddy wound popping and bubbling like lava from a goopy volcano. Neck twisted as far as I could get it, I saw Justine hovering over me in the wound. The thirteen skeletons from the castle grounds were surrounding me. Their arms and teeth were ready to capture and rip me asunder. This is if I were to somehow escape my bounds and bravely try to flee from my now permanent, captive state in the 21st-Century Castle of Worms.
But, it was hopeless.
It has always been and will continue to be in this and every other castle timeline.
Defeated, I lay back on the gurney and watched the crows, eyes as beady and murderous as ever, begin to swarm the room from a window to my left that I had only, in that moment when I had given up, just noticed.
As the crows descended upon me, it taunted me with its endless, unrealized possibilities.
- Jake Depree and the Castle of Worms - November 1, 2024
