The Keep

by Jennifer Egan

  Before I can do anything, Tom-Tom starts coming my way. He’s walking fast, but I’m too distracted to take that in. I stand there holding my tray and it’s only when people start to make way that I get what’s about to happen. And then time stretches out, it opens up and I’m looking into Tom-Tom’s blank eyes thinking, How did I miss it? Did the geckos trip me up? And then something shifts and I feel like I already knew, like it all happened before. Like I’ve been waiting for it.

  Tom-Tom throws an arm around my neck and puts a shank in my gut so fast I’m still holding the tray when he’s done. Davis is on him a second later like a wild man, a man who does seven hundred push-ups a day. He lifts Tom-Tom into the air and chucks him onto a table ten feet away. But Tom-Tom’s got backup: three guys from his lock who throw punches at Davis’s arms and head until the COs pull them off. I’m watching all this with a hot pain in my gut. The shank is still in me, and when I try to pull it out it resists, so I leave it. I feel the blood pushing out in gasps, and I hold my hands there trying to stop it. Then I lie on the floor because I’m tired and the words are starting to come up and I want to hear them, I want to catch them. I shut my eyes: redneck and juicehead and fuckwad and crapshoot and hothead, words floating around me like leaves coming off a tree, like I’m a kid lying on my back in the grass watching them come down: jive and joystick and jalopy and hollow and holy and Merry Christmas and Whose turn is it to put the star on the tree? It’s Paulie this year. No Paulie went home, his folks came and took him home, lucky SOB, except it wasn’t luck, he shaped up, that’s what happened, he did what he was supposed to do and I don’t know why that’s so hard for you, Ray, why you can’t seem to do that, maybe you’re just bad. Yeah maybe I am or maybe I just don’t want to go home, maybe home is worse than this….Voices, I’m hearing these old voices and wondering where the hell they’re coming from because it can’t be from here, can’t be this place. And then I see Davis holding his radio up to the window, twisting the knobs, working the reception, and I think: It’s true! He’s right! The technology works! Davis winks at me and I wink back because sure I hear them, yes I do, it’s been a long fucking time but I’d know those voices anywhere.

  Danny woke up sometime deep into the night. He was alone in his room and the castle was quiet. He had no idea what time it was or how long he’d been sleeping.

  He got out of bed and went to the window. Big clouds were moving around, but every couple of minutes they’d free up the moon, bright and round as a spotlight. Underneath him the garden was black.

  He’d been standing by the window awhile before he realized that the pain in his head was gone. Gone like he’d taken it off and left it back on his bed with the sweaty sheets. He touched his head, thinking maybe the bandages would be gone, too, but they were there, wrapped around the top half of his head and a little wet. Still, Danny felt good. Better than good—he felt strong and clear and completely awake for the first time since coming to the castle. How could he feel so good? Had all that sleeping finally wiped out his jet lag?

  In fact, Danny felt too good to stay in this room. He needed to get outside, move around in that moony light.

  He spent some time looking for his boots before he remembered he’d lost them. They were back at the keep, probably underneath that window he’d fallen out of. He put his sandals on instead. The air actually felt good on his bare toes.

  He looked around his bed for the walkie-talkie, but it was gone. Howard must have taken it back.

  The electric candles in the hall were still lit. Danny had no idea whose door was whose or which way was out, but he went left, and where the hall turned a corner he found a curved stairwell that looked a lot like the one he’d gone down with Howard that first day. There was a fluorescent bulb at the top, but the stair turns choked away the light as he went down. Luckily, Danny had his flashlight.

  It turned out these weren’t the same stairs. The ones Howard had taken him down were half renovated at the bottom, whereas these led straight into several feet of garbage: rotten sleeping bags, charred piles from fires, bent cans, cigarette butts. It reminded Danny of the crack dens he’d had to haul his friend Angus out of a few times. He picked his way through debris toward a door he was pretty sure led outside. He felt crawling on his bare feet and caught the oily flash of insect shells. Shit! Danny kicked, sending heavy bugs through the air as he pushed his way out the door into the garden.

  Its coolness wrapped around him. He sucked in big lungfuls of air that smelled like flowers. The wind was picking up in a way that felt like rain, and the clouds were moving fast across that flashing moon. He’d been inside a tower: Danny tipped back his head and saw its curved top against the sky, those square indentations.

  When he looked down, his feet were two white ghosts. Danny needed his boots, no question. He needed them now.

  Above the canopy of twigs and leaves over his head, the keep made a long black rectangle against the sky. There was flickery orange light in a window near the top, a fire. Danny used this to navigate, but something always got in his way: bushes, branches, rocks, vines. The sandals made his limp worse, and stuff touching his feet drove him half nuts. How did he ever wear sandals before? It was like walking around naked.

  But Danny felt good. Too good, almost. Not because he didn’t like feeling good—who doesn’t like feeling good? Because some little part of him didn’t believe he could feel this good. It seemed too easy. And because of that, there was an anxious feeling in Danny’s gut, a wobbly feeling, the kind of feeling that makes you worry (even though you feel good!) that something bad is about to happen.

  When he finally got to the keep, Danny put his hands on the stone and felt his way around to the side facing away from the castle, where Mick and Ann had been. And damned if one of his lucky boots wasn’t sitting right in the middle of bare ground like it was waiting for him! Too easy! Danny picked up the boot and stuck his nose inside and pulled in its sweet leather smell. When he’d first bought the boots all those years ago, he would keep them right by his bed so the last thing he smelled before he went to sleep and the first thing he smelled when he woke up was their leather. He’d figured the smell would fade, but it didn’t fade. Even after eighteen years that leather smell was still strong, which amazed Danny to the point where he wondered sometimes if he was imagining it.

  He took off his left sandal and pulled the boot on over his bare foot. This meant that his injured right leg was now maybe an inch and a half shorter than his booted left leg, forcing him to hobble while he looked around for the other boot. Danny searched every inch of ground between the base of the keep and the tree where Mick and Ann had been standing. He even groped around the corners of the keep, pointing his flashlight into places where there was no way the boot could have fallen. Nothing. He kept looking up at the window he’d fallen out of, trying to see where else the boot could have landed, and the fifth or sixth time he looked up he noticed something: a dark shape, like a hook, hanging off the window’s edge. He aimed his puny flashlight up and squinted into the dark.

  Unbelievable. The right boot was still hanging there.

  Danny chucked a rock at the boot, but he was way off. He tried again, then lobbed a bigger rock and this time it made a hollow sound like it was actually hitting the leather, but the boot stuck. He took a big stick and whaled it up there and it whacked the glass and Danny froze, expecting to hear shattered pieces falling, the baroness’s angry squawk. But nothing happened. She must have closed up that window and left his boot hanging there out of spite. Or maybe she was too short to see it. Anyway, a rock big enough to bring the boot down could easily break the glass, and that would bring on the baroness. No thanks. He’d have to come back in daylight with a ladder and a long stick.

  Danny kept his left boot on and carried his extra sandal away from the keep. Walking with a limp plus a big gap between his legs was not a lot of fun, but if he gave up on trying to walk normally, just let himself gimp along, it was sort of manageable. He would never
have done it in front of people.

  He headed back into the overgrown garden. The moon was all covered up and the air had the heavy feel of a storm. The ground was soft. When Danny shined his flashlight, the branches tunneled themselves around his beam. He felt the weight and mass of the garden around him, crowded with so much live stuff but at the same time empty, dead.

  After a few minutes of hobbling, Danny slowed down. Was he heading back to the castle? He felt like he’d been there for months. To the keep? Not with the baroness holed up inside it. An outside wall? But they all seemed far away, inaccessible, and how the hell would he climb one wearing a boot and a sandal, on top of his fucked-up knee?

  Danny stopped walking. There was no place he wanted to be. And realizing this made his good feeling start to leak away.

  In the sudden quiet of not walking, Danny heard a snap in the bushes near him. He froze and listened: wind creaked the branches, and there were little sounds that could be birds or mice. And behind all that, around it, something else. When Danny moved again he heard it move, too. Something in the garden.

  He got a coldness in his chest, like condensation. Fear.

  Danny’s heart kicked awake, and adrenaline washed his sinuses clear. He started walking again, hobbling as quickly as he could, wondering if he should take off his left boot and put his sandal back on. But he didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want to part with his lucky boot.

  He thought of the pool. The space around it was open, and in that clearing he’d be able to see what was near him, who was near him. He could face them head-on. And another thing made Danny want to get to the pool: the satellite dish was somewhere inside it, deep down. He wanted to be nearby.

  Just having a destination helped Danny hold himself together. He walked, limping, in what he guessed was the general direction of the pool. He tried to make noise as he went, to block out the sound of the other thing, but he could still hear it, sense it moving through the garden behind him. Danny had a creepy feeling of watching himself: a gimping, head-injured guy with a right foot full of big white toes anyone could reach out and grab, stumbling through a rotten garden outside a castle full of strangers in a country he didn’t know the name of. A guy at the end of the line is what Danny saw, with no options left. A guy with nothing, or why would he be here?

  Another squirt of cold. Danny talked to himself: Get it together. Get. It. Together.

  This was how the worm got in. You opened yourself to that kind of thinking and the worm crawled inside you and started to eat and didn’t stop until nothing was left. You saw yourself as a weak powerless guy and it was only a matter of time before everyone agreed you were that guy. Danny had seen it happen. The worm ate people up the way years had eaten away this castle: caving in ceilings, chewing through walls, tunneling under floorboards until even a perfectly renovated hallway with varnished doors and fake candles on the walls had a thousand bugs crawling around a few floors underneath it.

  Danny smelled the pool before he got there. A wind caught its foul odor and brought it through the cypress wall, tickling Danny’s face with it, ruffling up his hair, and he stopped walking, it was automatic. Stopped and felt that unclean wind on his face and heard something moving inside the cypress, a scratchy leathery sound that made the skin on his head shrink to the point of tugging under his bandages where the scalp was numb. Danny’s heart rammed his ribs. He stood still, scalp tightening and crawling. Only his eyes moved. He wasn’t going to run. This is all in my head. This is all the worm trying to get in.

  Danny reached in his pocket for the phone. The urge to make contact was so deep it cut through the facts (such as: he didn’t have a phone). It was a brain need, a reaching out from inside Danny’s skull that had nowhere to go, nothing to fasten itself to. He jabbed his fingers so deep in his pockets that they tore through the fabric. But there was no phone. And so that reaching urge reversed itself and bored straight back into Danny. It woke up the pain in his head.

  Danny found an opening in the cypress and pushed his way through. There was the pool: round, quiet, black. The Imagination Pool. In the dark you couldn’t tell its blackness came from inside. The wind was strong, leaves cartwheeling over the marble paving. That white marble was holding on to light from somewhere, maybe the sky, so there was a glow around the pool like you get just after it snows. Danny turned carefully in the open space, looking in every direction. No one else was there. He felt his heart calm down.

  The slowing of his blood made Danny dizzy, the relief of not being afraid and even more than that, knowing he’d been afraid of nothing. Not that Danny was safe—the worm was trying to get inside him, that was clear. He knew the signs. When you were vulnerable to the worm you had to take precautions, put a few key facts in a strong place where the worm couldn’t touch them if it somehow did get in. Danny used to think of his heart as that strong place, but now he had a better word: the keep. His own keep, inside him, where his treasures would be hidden in case the castle was invaded. What should go in Danny’s keep? A lot of stuff went through his head, a whole storm of stuff from eighteen years of friendships, girlfriends, triumphant moments, powerful people whose number two he’d been, but when it came down to what he couldn’t live without, there was only one thing: Martha Mueller. That she loved him. Danny pictured himself holding that fact in his hands like it was alive, putting it in a box inside his ribs and sealing up the box. And then the fear left him. He felt safe. Weak, wiped out, but safe. As long as Martha was in the keep, the worm couldn’t win.

  Danny had to sit. It wasn’t jet lag anymore, it was—what? The head injury, maybe. The hobbling. He went to the pool and kind of collapsed on the bench where he’d sat before. He looked at the water. The clear parts had a silver light from the sky or the stone, and the foul parts had the silver too, but in a texture like a greasy rug. Danny watched the water, taking long deep breaths. There was a pulse of light in the sky, faraway thunder. And then the water moved.

  It rippled, not small ripples that could come from a stone dropping in or a fish swimming around—these were ripples made by something big.

  A wave rolled under the sludge and washed up against the white marble edge of the pool with a little slap that sent a puff of bad smell into the air. Danny’s scalp tightened, pulling on his stitches, or staples, whatever they were. He felt the hair lift up from his head.

  The place had gone quiet. No insects, no wind, no rustling leaves. Quiet like a pause between things. Like someone holding their breath.

  Then Danny saw the shapes. Maybe they’d been there all along, but the water had him too distracted to notice. Two of them. It was hard to say if they were light or dark; they seemed a little of both, like he was looking at a negative. They started out apart and then came together at the edge of the pool and merged, so you couldn’t separate them. And then the water rippled in a long stinky wave.

  Danny wanted to stand. He actually said it out loud: Stand the fuck up. But he couldn’t move. His heart was beating so hard he thought he might puke.

  Was he seeing the twins? Was he watching them die? It seemed violent, whatever this was, like one person shoving another person. Or someone shoving both of them.

  Apart. Together. Push. A long ripple under the water and then a splash against the marble. Each splash a little bigger than the last one.

  Run, said a voice in Danny. Get out of here!

  Danny: I don’t run. I never run. I’m not afraid. But his heart was grinding, and there was ice in his chest.

  The water in the pool was starting to shake. It trembled, vibrated in tiny ripples like something huge was coming up from underneath.

  Danny stood up. This can’t be real. This isn’t real. I don’t believe this is happening. What he saw was the water opening up, a hole coming open in the water like a mouth or a tunnel or a grave, some dark cavity that made a little thread of puke jump up in Danny’s throat. It’s not real, I’m hallucinating. It’s all in my head so there’s nothing to be scared of. And below that, anoth
er voice, raw and terrified: I don’t want to see. Run, run!

  The hole in the water caved in, spreading wider and wider until the pool was the hole, a round black opening that looked like it led straight down to the center of the earth, its molten core. A sound came out of the hole—Danny barely heard it at first because it was one of those hums that could just be your own ears ringing, but the hum got louder every second until it was a roar, a howl, a scream—some horrible noise that filled up Danny’s ears and then shorted them out so all he heard was buzzing. That was when the words gripping sleep and grabbing sleep popped into Danny’s head, and all of a sudden he understood, his body jolted from the impact of figuring it out. I’m not awake! This is all a dream; I’ve been dreaming this whole time. The gripping sleep has got hold of me and it’s showing me all kinds of shit that looks real but it’s all just a dream, it’s all inside my head.

  Yeah, but what’s real? came a familiar voice close to Danny’s ear but somehow outside him, outside the pool, all of it. You’re having an experience, right? said the voice. You’re going through it, right?

  Danny smelled mint. It filled the air around the pool, zinging and pricking Danny’s eyes. And he realized that the new voice was Howard’s voice. Howard was here! He was nearby, inches away, which meant that Danny wasn’t here—he was lying in bed, and Howard was in the chair next to the bed, just like before. Danny hadn’t ever come outside, hadn’t even moved. He was dreaming.

  He shut his eyes to close out the roaring pool, which wasn’t real. He set his mind on Howard’s voice and minty breath outside the skin of the grabbing sleep. He felt like he was about to cry.

  Danny: Howard, help. I’m all fucked up.

  You’re doing fine, buddy. Just hang in there.

  Danny: I’m scared.

  No shame in that. We all get scared.

  Please wake me up. Please.