The Keep ac-1

by F. Paul Wilson

  Glenn mumbled something, Magda bent over him, touching her ear to his lips.

  "Go to my room," he said in a weak, dry, tortured voice. The odor of blood was fresh on his breath. He's bleeding inside!

  "I'll take you there as soon as I get Iuliu—" But would Iuliu help?

  His fingers plucked at her sleeve. "Listen to me! Get the case ... you saw it yesterday ... the one with the blade in it."

  "That's not going to help you now! You need medical care!"

  "You must! Nothing else can save me!"

  She straightened up, hesitated a moment, then jumped to her feet and ran. Her head started pounding again but now she found it easy to ignore the pain. Glenn wanted that sword blade. It didn't make sense, but his voice had been so full of conviction ... urgency ... need. She had to get it for him.

  Magda did not slacken her pace as she entered the inn, taking the stairs up to the second floor two at a time, slowing only when she entered the darkness of Glenn's room. She felt her way to the closet and lifted the case. With a high-pitched creak it fell open—she hadn't closed the catches when Glenn had surprised her here yesterday! The blade slipped out of the case and fell against the mirror with a crash. The glass shattered and cascaded onto the floor. Magda bent and quickly replaced the blade in its case, found the catches, closed them, then lifted the case into her arms, groaning under its unexpected weight. As she turned to leave, she pulled the blanket from the bed, then hurried across to her room for a second blanket.

  Iuliu and Lidia, alerted by the commotion she was making on the second floor, stood with startled expressions at the foot of the stairs as she descended.

  "Don't try to stop me!" Magda said as she rushed by. Something in her voice must have warned them away, for they stepped aside and let her pass.

  She stumbled back through the brush, the case and the blankets weighing her down, snagging on the branches, slowing her as she rushed toward Glenn, praying he was still alive. She found him lying on his back, weaker, his voice fainter.

  "The blade," he whispered as she leaned over him. "Take it out of the case."

  For an awful moment Magda feared he would ask for a coup de grace. She would do anything for Glenn—anything but that. But would a man with his injuries make so desperate a climb out of the gorge just to ask for death? She opened the case. Two large pieces of the shattered mirror lay within. She brushed them aside and lifted the dark, cold blade with both her hands, feeling the shape of the runes carved in its surface press against her palms.

  She passed it to his outstretched arms and almost dropped it when a faint blue glow, blue like a gas flame, leaped along its edges at his touch. As she released it to him, he sighed; his features relaxed, losing their pain, a look of contentment settling on them ... the look of a man who has come home to a warm and familiar room after a long, arduous winter journey.

  Glenn positioned the blade along the length of his battered, punctured, blood-soaked body, the point resting a few inches short of his ankles, the spike of the butt where the missing hilt should be almost to his chin. Folding his arms over the blade and across his chest, he closed his eyes.

  "You shouldn't stay here," he said in a faint, slurred voice. "Come back later."

  "I'm not leaving you."

  He made no reply. His breathing became shallower and steadier. He appeared to be asleep. Magda watched him closely. The blue glow spread to his forearms, sheathing them in a faint patina of light. She covered him with a blanket, as much for warmth as to hide the glow from the keep. Then she moved away, wrapped the second blanket around her shoulders, and seated herself with her back against a rock. Myriad questions, held at bay until now, rushed in on her.

  Who was he, really? What manner of man was this who suffered wounds enough to kill him many times over and then climbed a slope that would tax a strong man in perfect health? What manner of man hid his room's mirror in a closet along with an ancient sword with no hilt? Who now clasped that sword to his breast as he lay on the borderland of death? How could she entrust her love and her life to such a man? She knew nothing about him.

  Then Papa's ranting came back to her: He belongs to a group that directs the Nazis, that is using them for its own foul ends! He's worse than a Nazi!

  Could Papa be right? Could she be so blinded by her infatuation that she could not or would not see this? Glenn certainly was no ordinary man. And he did have secrets—he had been far from totally open with her. Was it possible that Glenn was the enemy and Molasar the ally?

  She drew the blanket closer around her. All she could do was wait.

  Magda's eyelids began to droop—the aftereffects of the concussion and the rhythmic sounds of Glenn's breathing lulled her. She struggled briefly, then succumbed ... just for a moment... just to rest her eyes.

  Klaus Woermann knew he was dead. And yet... not dead.

  He clearly remembered his dying. He had been strangled with deliberate slowness here in the subcellar in darkness lit only by the feeble glow of his fallen flashlight. Icy fingers with incalculable strength had closed on his throat, choking off the air until his blood had thundered in his ears and blackness had closed in.

  But not eternal blackness. Not yet.

  He could not understand his continued awareness. He lay on his back, his eyes open and staring into the darkness. He did not know how long he had been this way. Time had lost all meaning. Except for his vision, he was cut off from the rest of his body. It was as if it belonged to someone else. He could feel nothing, not the rocky earth against his back or the cold air against his face. He could hear nothing. He was not breathing. He could not move—not even a finger. When a rat had crawled over his face, dragging its matted fur across his eyes, he could not even blink.

  He was dead. And yet not dead.

  Gone was all fear, all pain. He was devoid of all feeling except regret. He had ventured into the subcellar to find redemption and had found only horror and death—his own death.

  Woermann suddenly realized that he was being moved. Although he could still feel nothing, he sensed he was being roughly dragged through the darkness by the back of his tunic, along a narrow passage, into a dark room—

  —and into light.

  Woermann's line of vision was along the limp length of his body. As he was dragged along a corridor strewn with granite rubble, his gaze swept across a wall he immediately recognized—a wall upon which words of an ancient tongue had been written in blood. The wall had been washed but brown smudges were still visible on the stone.

  He was dropped to the floor. His field of vision was now limited to a section of the partially dismantled ceiling directly above him. At the periphery of his vision, moving about, was a dark shape. Woermann saw a length of heavy rope snake over an exposed ceiling beam, saw a loop of that same rope go over his face, and then he was moving again...

  ... upward...

  ... until his feet left the ground and his lifeless body began to sway and swing and twist in the air. A shadowy figure melted into a doorway down the corridor and Woermann was left alone, hanging by his neck from a rope.

  He wanted to scream a protest to God. For he now knew that the dark being who ruled the keep was waging war not only against the bodies of the soldiers who had entered his domain, but against their minds and their spirits as well.

  And Woermann realized the role he was being forced to play in that war: a suicide. His men would think he had killed himself! It would completely demoralize them. Their officer, the man they looked to for leadership, had hanged himself—the ultimate cowardice, the ultimate desertion.

  He could not allow that to happen. And yet he could do nothing to alter the course of events. He was dead.

  Was this to be his penance for closing his eyes to the monstrousness of the war? If so, it was too much—too much to pay! To hang here and watch his own men and the einsatzkommandos come and gawk at him. And the final ignominy: to see Erich Kaempffer smiling up at him!

  Was this why he had been left te
etering on the edge of eternal oblivion? To witness his own humiliation as a suicide?

  If only he could do something!

  One final act to redeem his pride and—yes—his manhood. One last gesture to give meaning to his death.

  Something!

  Anything!

  But all he could do was hang and sway and wait to be found.

  Cuza looked up as a grating sound filled the room. The section of the wall that led into the base of the tower was swinging open. When it stopped moving, Molasar's voice came from the darkness beyond.

  "All is ready."

  At last! The wait had been almost unbearable. As the hours had edged by, Cuza had almost given up on seeing Molasar again tonight. Never had he been a patient man, but at no time could he remember being so consumed by an urgency such as he had known tonight. He had tried to distract himself by dredging up worries about how Magda was faring after that blow to the head ... it was no use. The coming destruction of "Lord Hitler" banished all other considerations from his mind. Cuza had paced the length, breadth, and perimeters of both rooms again and again, obsessed by his fierce longing to get on with it and yet unable to do a thing until word came from Molasar.

  And now Molasar was here. As Cuza ducked through the opening, leaving his wheelchair behind forever, he felt a cold metal cylinder pressed against the bare skin of his palm.

  "What—?" It was a flashlight.

  "You will need this."

  Cuza switched the flashlight on. It was German Army issue. The lens was cracked. He wondered who—

  "Follow me."

  Molasar surefootedly led the way down the winding steps that clung to the inner surface of the tower wall. He did not seem to need any light to find his way. Cuza did. He stayed close behind Molasar, keeping the flashlight beam trained on the steps before him. He wished he could take a moment to look around. For a long time, he had desperately wanted to explore the base of the tower and until now had had to do so vicariously through Magda. But there was no time to drink in the details. When all this was over he promised himself to return here and do a thorough inspection on his own.

  After a while they came to a narrow opening in the wall. He followed Molasar through and found himself in the subcellar. Molasar quickened his pace and Cuza had to strain to keep up. But he voiced no complaint, so thankful was he to be able to walk at all, to brave the cold without his hands losing their circulation or his arthritic joints seizing up on him. He was actually working up a sweat! Wonderful!

  Off to his right he saw light filtering down the stairway up to the cellar. He flashed his lamp to the left. The corpses were gone. The Germans must have shipped them out. Strange, their leaving the shrouds in a pile there.

  Over the sound of his hurried footsteps Cuza began to hear another noise. A faint scraping. As he followed Molasar out of the large cavern that made up the sub-cellar and into a narrower, tunnellike passage, the sound became progressively louder. He trailed Molasar through various turns until, after one particularly sharp left turn, Molasar stopped and beckoned Cuza to his side. The scraping sound was loud, echoing all about them.

  "Prepare yourself," Molasar said, his expression unreadable. "I have made certain use of the remains of the dead soldiers. What you see next may offend you, but it was necessary to retrieve my talisman. I could have found another way, but this was convenient ... and fitting."

  Cuza doubted there was much Molasar could do with the bodies of German soldiers that would truly offend him.

  He then followed him into a large hemispherical chamber with a roof of icy living rock and a dirt floor. A deep excavation had been sunk into the middle of that floor. And still the scraping, louder. Where was it coming from? Cuza looked about, the beam from his flashlight reflecting off the glistening walls and ceiling, diffusing light throughout the chamber.

  He noticed movement near his feet and all around the periphery of the excavation. Small movements. He gasped—rats! Hundreds of rats surrounded the pit, squirming and jostling one another, agitated ... expectant...

  Cuza saw something much larger than a rat crawling up the wall of the excavation. He stepped forward and pointed the flashlight directly into the pit—and almost dropped it. It was like looking into one of the outer rings of Hell. Feeling suddenly weak, he lurched away from the edge and pressed his shoulder against the nearest wall to keep from toppling over. He closed his eyes and panted like a dog on a stifling August day, trying to calm himself, trying to hold down his rising gorge, trying to accept what he had seen.

  There were dead men in the pit, ten of them, all in German uniforms of either gray or black, all moving about—even the one without the head!

  Cuza opened his eyes again. In the hellish half-light that suffused the chamber he watched one of the corpses crawl crablike up the side of the pit and throw an armful of dirt over the far edge, then slide back down to the bottom.

  Cuza pushed himself away from the wall and staggered to the edge for another look.

  They appeared not to need their eyes, for they never looked at their hands as they dug in the cold hard earth. Their dead joints moved stiffly, awkwardly, as if resisting the power that impelled them, yet they worked tirelessly, in utter silence, surprisingly efficient despite their ataxic movements. The scuffling and shuffling of their boots, the scraping of their bare hands on the near-frozen soil as they deepened and widened the excavation ... the noise rose and echoed off the walls and ceiling of the chamber, eerily amplified.

  Suddenly, the noise stopped, gone as if it had never been. They had all halted their movements and now stood perfectly still.

  Molasar spoke beside him. "My talisman lies buried beneath the last few inches of soil. You must remove it from the earth."

  "Can't they—?" Cuza's stomach turned at the thought of going down there.

  "They are too clumsy."

  Looking pleadingly at Molasar, he asked, "Couldn't you unearth it yourself? I'll take it anywhere you want me to after that."

  Molasar's eyes blazed with impatience. "It is part of your task! A simple one! With so much at stake do you balk now at dirtying your hands?"

  "No! No, of course not! It's just..." He glanced again at the corpses.

  Molasar followed his gaze. Although he said nothing, made no signal, the corpses began to move, turning simultaneously and crawling out of the pit. When they were all out, they stood in a ring along its edge. The rats crawled around and over their feet. Molasar's eyes swung back to Cuza.

  Without waiting to be told again, Cuza eased himself over the edge and slid along the damp dirt to the bottom. He balanced the flashlight on a rock and began to scrape away the loose earth at the nadir point of the conical pit. The cold and the filth didn't bother his hands. After the initial revulsion at digging in the same spot as the corpses, he found he actually enjoyed being able to work with his hands again, even at so menial a task as this. And he owed it all to Molasar. It was good to sink his fingers into the earth and feel the soil come away in chunks. It exhilarated him and he increased his pace, working feverishly.

  His hands soon contacted something other than dirt. He pulled at it and unearthed a square packet, perhaps a foot long on each side and a few inches thick. And heavy—very heavy. He pulled off the half-rotted cloth wrapper and then unfolded the coarse fabric that made up the inner packing.

  Something bright, metallic, and heavy lay within. Cuza caught his breath—at first he thought it was a cross. But that couldn't be. It was an almost-cross, designed along the same eccentric lines as the thousands laid into the walls of the keep. Yet none of those could compare with this one. For here was the original, an inch thick all around, the template on which all the others had been modeled. The upright was rounded, almost cylindrical and, except for a deep slot in its top, appeared to be of solid gold. The crosspiece looked like silver. He studied it briefly through the lower lenses of his bifocals but could find no designs or inscriptions.

  Molasar's talisman—the key to his power. It
stirred Cuza with awe. There was power in it—he could feel the power surge into his hands as he held it. He lifted it for Molasar to see and thought he detected a glow around it—or was that merely a reflection of the flashlight beam off its bright surface?

  "I've found it!"

  He could not see Molasar above but noticed the animated corpses backing away as he lifted the crosslike object over his head.

  "Molasar! Do you hear me?"

  "Yes." The voice seemed to come from somewhere back in the tunnel. "My power now resides in your hands. Guard it carefully until you have hidden it where no one will find it."

  Exhilarated, Cuza tightened his grip on the talisman.

  "When do I leave? And how?"

  "Within the hour—as soon as I have finished with the German interlopers. They must all pay now for invading my keep."

  The pounding on the door was accompanied by someone's calling his name. It sounded like Sergeant Oster's voice ... on the verge of hysteria. But Major Kaempffer was taking no chances. As he shook himself out of his bedroll, he grabbed his Luger.

  "Who is it?" He let his annoyance show in his tone. This was the second time tonight he had been disturbed. The first for that fruitless sortie across the causeway with the Jew, and now this. He glanced at his watch: almost four o'clock! It would be light soon. What could anyone want at this hour? Unless—someone else had been killed.

  "It's Sergeant Oster, sir."

  "What is it this time?" Kaempffer said, opening the door. One look at the sergeant's white face and he knew something was terribly wrong. More than just another death.

  "It's the captain, sir... Captain Woermann—"

  "It got him?" Woermann? Murdered? An officer?

  "He killed himself, sir."

  Kaempffer stared at the sergeant in mute shock, recovering only with great effort.

  "Wait here." Kaempffer closed the door and hurriedly pulled on his trousers, slipped into his boots, and threw his uniform jacket over his undershirt without bothering to button it. Then he returned to the door. "Take me to where you found him."