The glow began to fade. “Magda…”
She jumped at the sound. Glenn’s voice was much stronger than it had been when she had covered him. She pulled the blanket back over him, tucking it around his neck. His eyes were open, staring at the keep.
“Rest some more,” she whispered.
“What’s happening over there?”
“Some shooting before—a lot of it.”
With a groan, Glenn tried to sit up. Magda pushed him back easily. He was still very weak.
“Got to get to the keep…stop Rasalom.”
“Who’s Rasalom?”
“The one you and your father call Molasar. He reversed the letters of his name for you…real name is Rasalom…got to stop him!”
He tried to rise again and again Magda pushed him back.
“It’s almost dawn. A vampire can’t go anywhere after sunrise, so just—”
“He’s no more afraid of sunlight than you are!”
“But a vampire—”
“He’s not a vampire! Never was! If he were,” Glenn said, a note of despair creeping into his voice, “I wouldn’t bother trying to stop him.”
Dread caressed her, a cold hand against the middle of her back.
“Not a vampire?”
“He’s the source of the vampire legends, but what he craves is nothing so simple as blood. That notion crept into the folktales because people can see blood, and touch it. No one can see or touch what Rasalom feeds on.”
“You mean what you were trying to tell me last night before the soldiers…came?” She did not want to remember last night.
“Yes. He draws strength from human pain, misery, and madness. He can feed on the agony of those who die by his hand but gains far more from man’s inhumanity to other men.”
“That’s ridiculous! Nothing could live on such things. They’re too…too insubstantial!”
“Is sunlight ‘too insubstantial’ for a flower to need for growth? Believe me: Rasalom feeds on things that cannot be seen or touched—all of them bad.”
“You make him sound like the Serpent himself!”
“You mean Satan? The Devil?” Glenn smiled weakly. “Put aside every religion you’ve ever heard of. They mean nothing here. Rasalom predates them all.”
“I can’t believe—”
“He is a survivor of the First Age. He pretended to be a five-hundred-year-old vampire because that fit the history of the keep and the region. And because it generated fear so easily—another one of his delights. But he’s much, much older. Everything he told your father—everything—was a lie…except for the part about being weak and having to build his strength.”
“Everything? But what about saving me? What about curing Papa? And what about those villagers the major took hostage? They would have been executed if he had not saved them!”
“He saved no one. You told me he killed the two soldiers guarding the villagers. But did he set the villagers free? No! He added insult to injury by marching the dead soldiers up to the major’s quarters and making a fool out of him. Rasalom was trying to provoke the major into executing all the villagers on the spot. That’s the sort of atrocity that swells his strength. And after half a millennium of imprisonment, he needed much strengthening. Fortunately, events conspired against him and the villagers survived.”
“Imprisonment? But he told Papa…” Her voice trailed off. “Another lie?”
Glenn nodded. “Rasalom did not build the keep as he said. Nor was he hiding in it. The keep was built to trap and hold him…forever. Who could have foretold that it or anything else in the Dinu Pass might someday be considered of military value? Or that some fool would break the seal on his cell? Now, if he ever gets loose in the world—”
“But he’s loose now.”
“No. Not yet. That’s another one of his lies. He wanted your father to believe he was free, but he’s still confined to the keep by the other piece of this.” He pulled the blanket down and showed her the butt end of the sword blade. “The hilt to this blade is the only thing on earth Rasalom fears. It’s the only thing that has power over him. It can bind him. The hilt is the key. It locks him within the keep. The blade is useless without it, but the two joined together can destroy him.”
Magda shook her head in an attempt to clear it. This was becoming more incredible every minute!
“But the hilt—where is it? What does it look like?”
“You’ve seen its image thousands of times in the walls of the keep.”
“The crosses!”
Magda’s mind whirled. Then they weren’t crosses after all! They were modeled on the hilt of a sword—no wonder the crosspiece was set so high! She had been looking at them for years and had never even come close to guessing. And if Molasar—she had to start thinking of him as Rasalom now—was truly the source of the vampire legends, she could see how his fear of the sword hilt might have been transmuted into a fear of the cross in the folktales.
“But where—”
“Buried deep in the subcellar. As long as the hilt remains within the walls of the keep, Rasalom is bound by them.”
“But all he has to do is dig it up and dispose of it.”
“He can’t touch it, or even get too close to it.”
“Then he’s trapped forever!”
“No,” Glenn said in a very low voice as he looked into Magda’s eyes. “He has your father.”
Magda wanted to be sick, to scream No! But she could not. She had been turned to stone by Glenn’s quiet words…words that for the life of her she could not deny.
“Let me tell you what I think has happened,” he said into the lengthening silence. “Rasalom was released the first night the Germans moved into the keep. He had strength enough then to kill only one. After that he rested and took stock. His initial strategy, I think, was to kill them one at a time, to feed on that daily agony and on the fear that increased among the living each time he claimed one of them. He was careful not to kill too many at once, especially not the officers, for that might drive them all away. He probably hoped for one of three things to occur: The Germans would become so frustrated that they would blow up the keep, thereby freeing him; or they would bring in more and more reinforcements, affording him more lives to take, more fear to grow strong on; or that he might find among the men a corruptible innocent.”
Magda could barely hear her own voice. “Papa.”
“Or you. From what you told me, Rasalom’s attention seemed to be centered on you when he first revealed himself. But the captain put you over here, out of reach. Therefore Rasalom had to concentrate on your father.”
“But he could have used one of the soldiers!”
“He gains his greatest strength from the destruction of everything that is good in a person. The corruption of the values of a single decent human being enriches him more than a thousand murders. It’s a feast for Rasalom! The soldiers were useless to him. Veterans of Poland and other campaigns, they had killed proudly for their Führer. Little of value in them for Rasalom. And their reinforcements—death camp troopers! Nothing left in those creatures to debase! So the only real use he’s had for the Germans, besides the fear and death agony gleaned from them, is as digging tools.”
Magda couldn’t imagine…“Digging?”
“To unearth the hilt. I suspect that the ‘thing’ you heard shuffling around in the subcellar after your father sent you away was a group of the dead soldiers returning to their shrouds.”
Walking corpses…the thought was grotesque, too fantastic even to consider, and yet she remembered that story about the two dead soldiers who had walked from the place of their dying to the major’s room.
“But if he has the power to make the dead walk, why can’t he have one of them dispose of the hilt?”
“Impossible. The hilt negates his power. A corpse under his control would return to its inanimate state the instant it touched the hilt.” He paused. “Your father will be the one to carry the hilt from the keep.”
“But as soon as Papa touches the hilt, won’t Rasalom lose control over him?”
Glenn shook his head sadly. “You must realize by now that he’s helping Rasalom willingly…enthusiastically. Your father will be able to handle the hilt with ease because he’ll be acting of his own free will.”
Magda felt dead inside. “But Papa doesn’t know! Why didn’t you tell him?”
“Because it was his battle, not mine. And because I couldn’t risk letting Rasalom know I was here. Your father wouldn’t have believed me anyway—he preferred to hate me. Rasalom has done a masterful job on him, destroying his character by tiny increments, peeling away layer after layer of all the things he believed in, leaving only the base, venal aspects of his nature.”
It was true. Magda had seen it happening and had been afraid to admit it, but it was true.
“You could have helped him!”
“Perhaps. But I doubt it. Your father’s battle was against himself as much as against Rasalom. And in the end, evil must be faced alone. Your father made excuses for the evil he sensed within Rasalom, and soon he came to see Rasalom as the answer to all his problems. Rasalom started with your father’s religion. He does not fear the cross, yet he pretended to, causing your father to question his entire heritage, undermining all the beliefs and values derived from that heritage. Then Rasalom rescued you from your would-be rapists—a testimony to the quickness and adaptability of his mind—putting your father deep in his debt. Rasalom went on to promise him a chance to destroy Nazism and save your people. And then, the final stroke—the elimination of all the symptoms of the disease your father has suffered with for years. Rasalom had a willing slave then, one who would do just about anything he asked. He has not only stripped away most of the man you called ‘Papa,’ but has fashioned him into an instrument that will effect the release of mankind’s greatest enemy from the keep.”
Glenn struggled to a sitting position. “I’ve got to stop him once and for all!”
“Let him go,” Magda said through her misery as she contemplated what had happened to Papa—or rather, what Papa had allowed to happen to himself. She had to wonder: Would she or anybody else have been able to withstand such an assault on one’s character? “Perhaps that will free my father from Rasalom’s influence and we can go back to the way we were.”
“You will have no lives to go about if Rasalom is set free!”
“In this world of Hitler and the Iron Guard, what can Rasalom do that hasn’t been done already?”
“You haven’t been listening!” Glenn said angrily. “Once free, Rasalom will make Hitler seem a suitable playmate for whatever children you might have planned on having!”
“Nothing could be worse than Hitler,” Magda said. “Nothing.”
“Rasalom could. Don’t you see, Magda, that with Hitler, as evil as he is, there is still hope? Hitler is but a man. He is mortal. He will die or be killed someday…maybe tomorrow, maybe thirty years from now, but he will die. He only controls a small part of the world. And although he appears invincible now, he has yet to deal with Russia. Britain still defies him. And there is America—if those Americans decide to turn their vitality and productive capacity to war, no country, not even Hitler’s Germany, will be able to stand against them for long. So you see, there is still hope in this very dark hour.”
Magda nodded slowly. What Glenn said paralleled her own feelings—she had never given up hope.
“But Rasalom—”
“Rasalom, as I told you, feeds on human debasement. And never in the history of humankind has there been such a glut of it as there is today in Eastern Europe. As long as the hilt remains within the keep walls, Rasalom is not only trapped, but is insulated from what goes on outside. Remove the hilt and it will all rush in on him at once—all the death, misery, and butchery of Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz, and all the other death camps, all the monstrousness of modern war. He’ll absorb it like a sponge, feast on it and grow incalculably strong. His power will balloon beyond all comprehension.
“But he’ll not be satisfied. He’ll want more. He’ll move swiftly around the world, slaying heads of state, throwing governments into confusion, reducing nations to terrified mobs. What army could stand against the legions of the dead he is capable of raising against it? Soon all will be in chaos. And then the real horror will begin. Nothing worse than Hitler, you say? Think of the entire world as a death camp!”
Magda’s mind rebelled at the vista Glenn was describing. “It couldn’t happen!”
“Why not? Do you think there will be a shortage of volunteers to run Rasalom’s death camps? The Nazis have shown that there are plenty of men more than willing to slaughter their fellows. But it will go far beyond that. You’ve seen what has happened to the villagers today, haven’t you? All the worst in their natures has been drawn to the surface. Their responses to the world have been reduced to anger, hate, and violence.”
“But how?”
“Rasalom’s influence. He has grown steadily stronger within the keep, feeding on the death and fear there, and on the slow disintegration of your father’s character. And as he has gained strength, the walls of the keep have been weakened by the soldiers. Every day they tear down a little more of the internal structure, compromising its integrity. And every day the influence of Rasalom’s presence extends farther beyond those walls.
“The keep was built to an ancient design, the images of the hilt placed in a specific pattern in the walls to cut Rasalom off from the world, to contain his power, to seal him in. Now that pattern has been tampered with and the villagers are paying the price. If Rasalom escapes and feeds on the death camps, the whole world will pay a similar price. For Rasalom will not be as selective as Hitler when it comes to victims: Everyone will be targeted. Race, religion, none of that will matter. Rasalom will be truly egalitarian. The rich will not be able to buy their way out, the pious will not be able to pray their way out, the crafty will not be able to sneak or lie their way out. Everyone will suffer. Women and children the most. People will be born into misery; they will spend their days in despair; they will die in agony. Generation after generation, all suffering to feed Rasalom.”
He paused for breath, then: “And the worst of it all, Magda, is that there will be no hope. And no end to it! Rasalom will be untouchable…invincible…deathless. If he is freed now, there will be no stopping him. Always in the past the sword has held him back. But now…with the world as it is…he will grow too strong for even this blade reunited with its hilt to stop him. He must never leave the keep!”
Magda saw that Glenn meant to go into the keep.
“No!” she cried, her arms reaching to hold him back. She couldn’t let him go. “He’ll destroy you in your condition! Isn’t there anybody else?”
“Only me. No one else can do this. Like your father, I have to face this alone. After all, it’s really my fault that Rasalom still exists at all.”
“How can that be?”
Glenn didn’t answer. Magda tried another approach. “Where did Rasalom come from?”
“He was a man…once. But he gave himself over to a dark power and was forever changed by it.”
Magda felt a catch in her throat. “But if Rasalom serves a ‘dark power,’ who do you serve?”
“Another power.”
She sensed his resistance, but she pressed on.
“A power for good?”
“Not quite.”
“For how long?”
“All my life.”
“How can it be…?” She was afraid of the answer. “How can it be your fault, Glenn?”
He looked away. “My name isn’t Glenn—it’s Glaeken. I’m as old as Rasalom. I built the keep.”
Cuza had not seen Molasar since descending into the pit to uncover the talisman. He had said something about making the Germans pay for invading his keep, then his voice had trailed off and he was gone. The corpses had begun to move then, filing out behind the miraculous being who controlled them.
But Molasar had said to wait here. And now, with the faint echoes of gunfire seeping down from above, Cuza knew why: Molasar had not wanted the man to whom he had entrusted his source of power to be endangered by any stray bullets. After a while the shooting stopped. Leaving the talisman behind, Cuza took his flashlight and climbed to the top of the pit where he stood among the clustered rats. They no longer bothered him; he was too intent on listening for Molasar’s return.
Soon he heard it. Footsteps approaching. More than one pair. He flashed his light toward the entrance to the chamber and saw Major Kaempffer round the corner and approach him. A cry escaped Cuza and he almost fell over into the pit, but then he saw the glazed eyes, the slack expression, and realized that the SS major was dead. Woermann came filing in behind him, equally dead, a length of rope trailing from his neck.
“I thought you might like to see these two,” Molasar said, following the dead officers into the chamber. “Especially the one who proposed to build the so-called death camp for our fellow Wallachians. Now I shall seek out this Hitler and dispose of him and his minions.” He paused. “But first, my talisman. You must see to it that it is securely hidden. Only then can I devote my energies to ridding the world of our common foe.”
“Yes!” Cuza said, feeling his pulse begin to race. “It’s right here!”
He scrambled down into the pit and grabbed the talisman. As he tucked it under his arm and began to climb up again, he saw Molasar step back.
“Wrap it up,” he said. “Its precious metals will attract unwanted attention should someone see them.”
“Of course.” Cuza reached for the wadded wrapper and packing. “I’ll tie it up securely when I get into the better light upstairs. Don’t worry. I’ll see to it that it’s all—”
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