“Oh, okay. Good.”
Toby grinned. “See how easy your life is, having a son who’s so diligent about his homework?”
“It is. It’s very relaxing.”
“Because, you know, there are a lot of dumb and lazy kids out there.”
“I know.”
“I’ll be back before Dad gets home.”
Toby walked about half a mile into the woods, to his favorite spot. Two trees had grown together at the base, forming a surprisingly comfortable seat where the trunks split apart. He set his backpack on the ground, sat on the trees, and began to work through some math problems. Math was his least favorite subject outside of physical education, but he liked Mr. Hesser’s nerdy sense of humor, and paid enough attention to ace every test. His report card was always straight A’s except for music. He enjoyed playing the trumpet but was very, very bad at it.
He completed the math problems, then started on his essay. He’d already finished the entire book—he didn’t like reading books a chapter at a time, and even if the book wasn’t anything spectacular he usually found himself reading through to the end. This one he loved.
He finished up the essay, then spent a few minutes studying for his history quiz. The forest was a wonderful place to study, free of distractions, and it didn’t take much time for the material to sink in. He put his books aside, ran through a list of mental questions and answers to test his knowledge, then stood up, satisfied. Now he could enjoy the rest of his evening.
Then he remembered the sensation of his face splashing into the contaminated water, and his mood soured.
Jerks.
What was wrong with them? Why was humiliating a fellow student their idea of a good time? What pleasure could they get from doing something like that?
Well, admittedly, Toby would get a lot of pleasure from dunking Larry and Nick’s heads in a toilet, preferably the same toilet at the same time, but that was purely revenge based. He hadn’t done anything to them to deserve this.
Jerks. Creeps. Idiots.
Forget about them, he thought. Why let a pair of bullies ruin his evening? His homework was done, he didn’t have to work at the grocery store tonight, it wasn’t raining, the weather hadn’t turned cold yet, and he had the entire forest at his disposal. Screw ’em. He was going to enjoy himself.
He walked for a while, but it didn’t make him feel any better, so he picked up his pace to a jog. He kept his eyes on the ground so that he wouldn’t trip—the forest wasn’t exactly the safest jogging environment, and Toby had extreme tendencies toward being a klutz.
He was only able to jog for a few minutes before he got a stitch in his side, so he rested for a moment until the pain faded, then resumed his jog. Boy, was he in terrible shape. This was embarrassing. He hoped the woodland creatures weren’t laughing at him.
There had to be a way to get back at the bullies without risking a broken nose. What if he bought them each a “Thank You” card for the toilet incident? That would really mess with their minds. It could be a really colorful card, maybe with a piece of chocolate inside, presented to them with no trace of irony. Something like that might really fuel their sense of paranoia. They’d wonder exactly what he had planned for them. Their stomachs would hurt whenever they saw him. It would be glorious!
“What does this mean?” Larry would ask, reading the card for the 73rd time. “Has he gone deranged? Or does he have a ghastly fate in store for us?”
“I do not know!” Nick would answer. “But the suspense may drive me mad!”
Toby felt a little better as he ran.
His dad always got home at 7:15 sharp, which gave him another two hours to goof around in the woods. Maybe he’d see how far he could get in an hour. He spent a lot of time in the woods and knew the few square miles behind his house well, but it was a vast forest that offered new discoveries all the time. Mostly just different trees, but still…
He moved through the woods for about half an hour, alternating between jogging, walking fast, and a couple of brief bursts of sprinting. He should probably join track at school. Might make him some friends. Or one friend.
He stopped running.
Something was lying on the ground in front of a small clearing. Toby walked over to investigate. It was a wooden sign, lying on its side, mostly covered by bushes. The red lettering had faded to almost the same grey color as the wood, but the words were still legible: Danger. Keep Out.
Wow.
A couple of years ago, Toby had discovered an old rusted car, right there amidst the trees. It had looked like something from the 1930’s. He’d spent long nights wondering how it got there. Rationally, he knew that the answer was straightforward, that there had probably just been a path at one time that had since been abandoned and overgrown. But there were dozens of much more interesting scenarios, and they’d captured his imagination until a few weeks later when he found the deer carcass. He’d searched the vehicle thoroughly, but alas, there was no hidden stash of mobster cash.
Danger. Keep Out promised something even more exciting.
What could it be? An abandoned mine? An old bunker filled with explosives?
Toby slowly stepped through the clearing, which was a circle about fifty feet in diameter, watching his feet to make sure he didn’t walk in a bear trap or something like that. The clearing itself seemed to be devoid of anything interesting. He walked around the perimeter, then walked across it several times, but didn’t see anything that looked even remotely worthy of the sign.
They wouldn’t put out a sign like that for no reason. There had to be something. Maybe it was the former site of a horrible plague.
No, even in ancient times, people probably took stronger precautions against the spread of a plague than simply putting out a wooden sign.
He kept searching the area, but there was nothing. What a rip-off.
What if the sign had been moved? He just needed to keep searching. He continued to walk around the area, not going quite so far as to crawl around on his hands and knees, but making sure he was searching thoroughly. If there was something great out here, he was going to find it.
About five minutes beyond the sign, he found a path. A narrow uphill path that looked recently used.
Well, maybe not. There weren’t any distinct footprints or broken branches or anything specific to indicate that somebody might have recently taken a stroll around here. Still, Toby had a weird feeling, something he couldn’t quite pinpoint, that he wasn’t the only person to have used this path today.
This meant that, as a rational, intelligent human being, his best bet was to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.
Instead, he stepped onto the path and followed it.
The Keep
A bonus excerpt from Paul’s novel, THE KEEP, also available in the Kindle Store…
Privates Friedrich Waltz and Karl Flick, members of the first Death’s Head unit under Major Kaempffer, stood in their black uniforms, their gleaming black helmets, and shivered. They were bored, cold, and tired. They were unaccustomed to this sort of night duty. Back at Auschwitz they had had warm, comfortable guardhouses and watchtowers where they could sit and drink coffee and play cards while the prisoners cowered in their drafty shacks. Only occasionally had they been required to do gate duty and march the perimeter in the open air.
True, here they were inside, but their conditions were as cold and as damp as the prisoners’. That wasn’t right.
Private Flick slung his Schmeisser behind his back and rubbed his hands together. The fingertips were numb despite his gloves. He stood beside Waltz who was leaning against the wall at the angle of the two corridors. From this vantage point they could watch the entire length of the entry corridor to their left, all the way to the black square of night that was the courtyard, and at the same time keep watch on the prison block to their right.
“I’m going crazy, Karl,” Waltz said. “Let’s do something. “
“Like what?”
“Ho
w about making them fall out for a little Sachsengruss?”
“They aren’t Jews.”
“They aren’t Germans, either.”
Flick considered this. The Sachsengruss, or Saxon greeting, had been his favorite method of breaking down new arrivals at Auschwitz. For hours on end he would make them perform the exercise: deep knee bends with arms raised and hands behind the head. Even a man in top condition would be in agony within half an hour. Flick had always found it exhilarating to watch the expressions on the prisoners’ faces as they felt their bodies begin to betray them, as their joints and muscles cried out in anguish. And the fear in their faces. For those who fell from exhaustion were either shot on the spot or kicked until they resumed the exercise. Even if he and Waltz couldn’t shoot any of the Romanians tonight, at least they could have some fun with them. But it might be hazardous.
“Better forget it,” Flick said. “There’s only two of us. What if one of them tries to be a hero?”
“We’ll only take a couple out of the room at a time. Come on, Karl! It’ll be fun!”
Flick smiled. “Oh, all right.”
It wouldn’t be as challenging as the game they used to play at Auschwitz, where he and Waltz held contests to see how many of a prisoner’s bones they could break and still keep him working. But at least a little Sachsengruss would be diverting.
Flick began fishing out the key to the padlock that had transformed the last room on the corridor into a prison cell. There were four rooms available and they could have divided up the villagers but they had crowded all ten into a single chamber instead. He was anticipating the look on their faces when he opened the door—the wincing, lip-quivering fear when they saw his smile and realized they would never receive any mercy from him. It gave him a certain feeling inside, something indescribable, wonderful, something so addictive that he craved more and more of it.
He was halfway to the door when Waltz’s voice stopped him.
“Just a minute, Karl.”
He turned. Waltz was squinting down the corridor toward the courtyard, a puzzled expression on his face. “What is it?” Flick asked.
“Something’s wrong with one of the bulbs down there. The first one—it’s going out.”
“So?”
“It’s fading out.” He glanced at Flick and then back down the corridor. “Now the second one’s fading!” His voice rose half an octave as he lifted his Schmeisser and cocked it. “Get over here!”
Flick dropped the key, swung his own weapon to the ready position, and ran to join his companion. By the time he reached the juncture of the two corridors, the third bulb had gone dark. He tried but could make out no details of the corridor behind the dead bulbs. It was as if the area had been swallowed by impenetrable darkness.
“I don’t like this,” Waltz said.
“Neither do I. But I don’t see a soul. Maybe it’s the generator. Or a bad wire.”
Flick knew he didn’t believe this any more than Waltz did. But he had had to say something to hide his growing fear. Einsatzkommandos were supposed to arouse fear, not feel it.
The fourth bulb began to die. The dark was only a dozen feet away.
“Let’s move into here,” Flick said, backing into the well-lit recess of the rear corridor. He could hear the prisoners muttering in the last room behind them. Though they could not see the dying bulbs, they sensed something was wrong.
Crouched behind Waltz, Flick shivered in the growing cold as he watched the illumination in the outer corridor continue to fade. He wanted something to shoot at but could see only blackness.
And then the blackness was upon him, freezing his joints and dimming his vision. For an instant that seemed to stretch to a lifetime, Private Karl Flick became a victim of the soulless terror he so loved to inspire, felt the deep, gut-tearing pain he so loved to inflict. Then he felt nothing.
Slowly the illumination returned to the corridors, first to the rear, then to the access passage. The only sounds came from the villagers trapped in their cell: whimpering from the women, relieved sobs from the men as they all felt themselves released from the panic that had seized them. One man tentatively approached the door to peer through a tiny space between two boards. His field of vision was limited to a section of floor and part of the rear wall of the corridor.
He could see no movement. The floor was bare except for a splattering of blood, still red, still wet, still steaming in the cold. And on the rear wall there was more blood, but this was smeared instead of splattered. The smears seemed to form a pattern, like letters from an alphabet he almost recognized, forming words that hovered just over the far edge of recognition. Words like dogs howling in the night, naggingly present, but ever out of reach.
The man turned away from the door and rejoined his fellow villagers huddled in the far corner of the room.
Someone was at the door.
Kaempffer’s eyes snapped open; he feared that the earlier nightmare was going to repeat itself. But no. This time he could sense no dark, malevolent presence on the other side of the wall. The agent here seemed human. And clumsy. If stealth were the intruder’s aim, he was failing miserably. But to be on the safe side, Kaempffer pulled his Luger from the holster coiled at his elbow.
“Who’s there?”
No reply.
The rattle of a fumbling hand working the latch continued. Kaempffer could see breaks in the strip of light along the bottom of the door, but they gave no clue as to who might be out there. He considered turning on the lamp, but thought better of it. The dark room gave him an advantage—an intruder would be silhouetted against the light from the hall.
“Identify yourself!”
The fumbling at the latch stopped, to be replaced by a faint creaking and cracking, as if some huge weight were leaning against the door, trying to push through it. Kaempffer couldn’t be sure in the dark, but he thought he saw the door bulge inward. That was two-inch oak! It would take massive weight to do that! As the creaking of the wood grew louder, he found himself trembling and sweating. He had nowhere to go. And now came another sound, as if something were clawing at the door to get in. The noises assailed him, growing louder, paralyzing him. The cracking of the wood was so loud that it seemed it must break into a thousand fragments; the hinges cried out as their metal fastenings were tortured from the stone. Something had to give! He knew he should be chambering a shell into his Luger but he could not move.
The latch suddenly screeched and gave way, the door bursting open and slamming against the wall. Two figures stood outlined in the light from the hall. By their helmets, Kaempffer knew them to be German soldiers, and by their jackboots he knew them to be two of the einsatzkommandos he had brought with him. He should have relaxed at the sight of them, but for some reason he did not. What were they doing breaking into his room?
“Who is it?” he demanded.
They made no reply. Instead, they stepped forward in unison toward where he lay frozen in his bedroll. Something was wrong with their gait—not a gross disorder, but a subtle grotesquery. For one disconcerting moment, Major Kaempffer thought the two soldiers would march right over him. But they stopped at the edge of his bed, simultaneously, as if on command. Neither said a word. Nor did they salute.
“What do you want?” He should have been furious, but the anger would not come. Only fear. Against his wishes, his body was shrinking into the bedroll, trying to hide.
“Speak to me!” The command sounded like a bleat.
No reply. He reached down with his left hand and found the battery lamp beside his bed, all the while keeping the Luger in his right trained on the silent pair looming over him. When his questing fingers found the toggle switch, he hesitated, listening to his own rasping respirations. He had to see who they were and what they wanted, but a deep part of him warned against turning on the light.
Finally, he could stand it no longer. With a groan, he flicked the toggle and held up the lamp.
Privates Flick and Waltz stood over him, face
s white and contorted, eyes glazed. A gaping crescent of torn and bloodied flesh grinned down at him from the place where each man’s throat had been. No one moved … the two dead soldiers wouldn’t, Kaempffer couldn’t. For a long, heart-stopping moment, Kaempffer lay paralyzed, the lamp held aloft in his hand, his mouth working spasmodically around a scream of fear that could not pass his locked throat.
Then the tableau was broken. Silently, a1most gracefully, the two soldiers leaned forward and fell onto their commanding officer, pinning him in his bedroll under hundreds of pounds of limp dead flesh.
As Kaempffer struggled frantically to pull himself out from under the two corpses, he heard a far-off voice begin to wail in mortal panic. An isolated part of his brain focused on the sound until he identified it.
DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror) Page 41