The Keep

  Yet Magda hesitated to insist that he rest. Lately he had lost interest in everything, spending his days seated by the front window, staring out at the streets and seeing nothing. Doctors, when she could get one in to see him, had told her it was melancholia, common in his condition. Nothing to be done for it. Just give him aspirin for the constant ache, and codeine—when available—for the awful pains in every joint.

  He had been a living dead man. Now he was showing signs of life. Magda couldn’t bring herself to damp them. As she watched, he paused over De Vermis Mysteriis, removed his glasses, and rubbed a cotton-gloved hand over his eyes. Now perhaps was the time to pry him away from those awful books and persuade him to rest.

  “Why didn’t you tell them about your theory?” she asked.

  “Eh?” He looked up. “Which one?”

  “You told them you don’t really believe in vampires, but that’s not quite true, is it? Unless you finally gave up on that pet theory of yours.”

  “No, I still believe there might have been one true vampire—just one—from whom all the Romanian lore has originated. There are solid historical clues, but no proof. And without hard proof I could never publish a paper. For the same reason, I chose not to say anything about it to the Germans.”

  “Why? They’re not scholars.”

  “True. But right now they think of me as a learned old man who might be of use to them. If I told them my theory they might think I was just a crazy old Jew and useless. And I can think of no one with a shorter life expectancy than a useless Jew in the company of Nazis. Can you?”

  Magda shook her head quickly. This was not how she wanted the conversation to go. “But what of the theory? Do you think the keep might have housed…”

  “A vampire?” Papa made a tiny gesture with his immobile shoulders. “Who can even say what a vampire might really be? There’s been so much folklore about them, who can tell where reality leaves off—assuming there was some reality involved—and myth begins? But there’s so much vampire lore in Transylvania and Moldavia that something around here must have engendered it. At the core of every tall tale lies a kernel of truth.”

  His eyes were alight in the expressionless mask of his face as he paused thoughtfully.

  “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that there is something uncanny going on here. These books are proof enough that this structure has been connected with deviltry. And that writing on the wall…whether the work of a human madman or a sign that we are dealing with one of the moroi, the undead, is yet to be seen.”

  “What do you think?” she asked, pressing for some sort of reassurance.

  Her flesh crawled at the thought of the undead actually existing. She had never given such tales the slightest bit of credence, and had often wondered if her father had been playing some sort of intellectual game in his talk of them. But now…

  “I don’t think anything right now. But I feel we may be on the verge of an answer. It’s not rational yet…not something I can explain. But the feeling is there. You feel it, too. I can tell.”

  Magda nodded silently. She felt it. Oh, yes, she felt it.

  Papa was rubbing his eyes again. “I can’t read anymore, Magda.”

  “Come, then,” she said, shaking off her disquiet and moving toward him. “I’ll help you to bed.”

  “Not yet. I’m too wound up to sleep. Play something for me.”

  “Papa—”

  “You brought your mandolin. I know you did.”

  “Papa, you know what it does to you.”

  “Please?”

  She smiled. She could never refuse him anything for long. “All right.”

  She had cater-cornered the mandolin into the larger suitcase before leaving. It had been reflex, really. The mandolin went wherever Magda went. Music had always been central to her life, and, since Papa had lost his position at the university, a major part of their livelihood. She had become a music teacher after moving into their tiny apartment, bringing her young students in for mandolin lessons or going to their homes to teach them piano. She and Papa had been forced to sell their own piano before moving.

  She seated herself in the chair that had been brought in with the firewood and bedrolls and made a quick check of the tuning, adjusting the first set of paired strings, which had gone flat during the trip. When she was satisfied, she began a complicated mixture of strumming and bare-fingered picking she had learned from the Gypsies, providing both rhythm and melody. The tune was also from the Gypsies, a typically tragic melody of unrequited love followed by death of a broken heart.

  As she finished the second verse and moved into the first bridge, she glanced up at her father. He was leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, the gnarled fingers of his left hand pressing the strings of an imaginary violin through the fabric of his gloves, the right hand and forearm dragging an imaginary bow across those same strings but in only the minute movements his joints would allow. He had been a good violinist in his day, and the two of them had often done duets together on this song, she picking counterpoint to the soaring, tearful, molto rubato figures he would coax from his violin.

  And although his cheeks were dry, he was crying.

  “Oh, Papa, I should have known…that was the wrong song.”

  She was furious with herself for not thinking. She knew so many songs, and yet she had picked one that would most remind him that he could no longer play. She started to rise to go to him and stopped. The room did not seem as well lit as it had a moment ago.

  “It’s all right, Magda. At least I can remember all the times I played along with you…better than never having played at all. I can still hear in my head how my violin used to sound.” His eyes were still closed behind his glasses. “Please. Play on.”

  But Magda did not move. She felt a chill descend upon the room and looked about for a draft. Was it her imagination, or was the light fading?

  Papa opened his eyes and saw her expression. “Magda?”

  “The fire’s going out!”

  The flames weren’t dying amid smoke and sputter, they were simply wasting away, retreating into the charred wood. And as they waned, so did the bulb strung from the ceiling. The room grew steadily darker, but with a darkness that was more than a mere absence of light. It was almost a physical thing. With the darkness came a penetrating cold, and an odor, a sour acrid aroma of evil that conjured images of corruption and open graves.

  “What’s happening?”

  “He’s coming, Magda! Stand over by me!”

  Instinctively she was already moving toward Papa, seeking to shelter him even as she herself sought shelter at his side. Trembling, she wound up in a crouch beside his chair, clutching his gnarled hands in hers.

  “What are we going to do?” she said, not knowing why she was whispering.

  “I don’t know.” Papa, too, was trembling.

  The shadows grew deeper as the lightbulb faded and the fire died to wan glowing embers. The walls were gone, misted in impenetrable darkness. Only the glow from the coals, a dying beacon of warmth and sanity, allowed them to keep their bearings.

  They were not alone. Something was moving about in that darkness. Stalking. Something unclean and hungry.

  A wind began to blow, rising from a breeze to full gale force in a matter of seconds, howling through the room although the door and the shutters had all been pulled closed.

  Magda fought to free herself from the terror that gripped her. She released her father’s hands. She could not see the door, but remembered it having been directly opposite the fireplace. With the icy gale whipping at her, she moved around to the front of Papa’s wheelchair and began to push it backward to where the door should be. If only she could reach the courtyard, maybe they would be safe. Why, she could not say, but staying in this room seemed like standing in a queue and waiting for death to call their names.

  The wheelchair began to roll. Magda pushed it about five feet toward the place where she had last seen the door and then she could push
it no farther. Panic rushed over her. Something would not let them pass! Not an invisible wall, hard and unyielding, but almost as if someone or something in the darkness was holding the back of the chair and making a mockery of her best efforts.

  And for an instant, in the blackness above and behind the back of the chair, the impression of a pale face looking down at her. Then it was gone.

  Magda’s heart was thumping and her palms were so wet they were slipping on the chair’s oaken armrests. This wasn’t really happening! It was all a hallucination! None of it was real…that was what her mind told her. But her body believed! She looked into her father’s face so close to hers and knew his terror reflected her own.

  “Don’t stop here!” he cried.

  “I can’t get it to move any farther!”

  He tried to crane his neck around to see what blocked them but his joints forbade it. He turned back to her.

  “Quick! Over by the fire!”

  Magda changed the direction of her efforts, leaning backward and pulling. As the chair began to roll toward her, she felt something clutch her upper arm in a grip of ice.

  A scream clogged in her throat. Only a high-pitched, keening wail escaped. The cold in her arm was a pain, shooting up to her shoulder, lancing toward her heart. She looked down and saw a hand gripping her arm just above the elbow. The fingers were long and thick; short, curly hairs ran along the back of the hand and up the length of the fingers to the dark, overlong nails. The wrist seemed to melt into the darkness.

  The sensations spreading over her from that touch, even through the fabric of her sweater and the blouse beneath it, were unspeakably vile, filling her with loathing and revulsion. She searched the air over her shoulder for a face. Finding none, she let go of Papa’s chair and struggled to free herself, whimpering in naked fear. Her shoes scraped and slid along the floor as she twisted and pulled away, but she could not break free. And she could not bring herself to touch that hand with her own.

  Then the darkness began to change, lighten. A pale, oval shape moved toward her, stopping only inches away. It was a face. One from a nightmare.

  He had a broad forehead. Long, lank black hair hung in thick strands on either side of his face, strands like dead snakes attached by their teeth to his scalp. Pale skin, sunken cheeks, and a hooked nose. Thin lips were drawn back to reveal yellowed teeth, long and almost canine in quality. But his eyes, gripping Magda more fiercely than the icy hand on her arm, killed off her wailing cry and stilled her frantic struggles.

  His eyes. Large and round, cold and crystalline, the pupils dark holes into a chaos beyond reason, beyond reality itself, black as a night sky that had never been blued by the sun or marred by the light of moon and stars. The surrounding irises were almost as dark, dilating as she watched, widening the twin doorways, drawing her into the madness beyond…

  …madness. The madness was so attractive. It was safe, it was serene, it was isolated. It would be so good to pass through and submerge herself in those dark pools…so good…

  No!

  Magda fought the feeling, fought to push herself away.

  But…why fight? Life was nothing but disease and misery, a struggle that everyone eventually lost. What was the use? Nothing you did really mattered in the long run. Why bother?

  She felt a swift undertow, almost irresistible, drawing her toward those eyes. She sensed lust there, for her, but a lust that went beyond the mere sexual, a lust for all that she was. She felt herself turn and lean toward those twin doorways of black. It would be so easy to let go…

  …She held on, something within her refusing to surrender, urging her to fight the current. But it was so strong, and she felt so tired, and what did it all matter, anyway?

  A sound…music…and yet not music at all. A sound in her mind, all that music was not…nonmelodic, disharmonic, a delirious cacophony of discord that rattled and shook and sent tiny cracks through the feeble remainder of her will. The world around her—everything—began to fade, leaving only the eyes…only the eyes…

  …She wavered, teetering on the edge of forever…

  …then she heard Papa’s voice.

  Magda clutched at the sound, clung to it like a rope, pulled herself hand over hand along its length. Papa was not calling to her, was not even speaking in Romanian, but it was his voice, the only familiar thing in the chaos about her.

  The eyes turned away. Magda was free. The hand released her.

  She stood gasping, perspiring, weak, confused, the gale in the room pulling at her clothes, at the kerchief that bound her hair, stealing her breath. And her terror grew, for the eyes were now turning on her father. He was too weak!

  But Papa did not flinch under the gaze. He spoke again as he had before, the words garbled, incomprehensible to her. She saw the awful smile on the white face fade as the lips drew into a thin line. The eyes narrowed to mere slits, as if the mind behind them were considering Papa’s words, weighing them.

  Magda watched the face, unable to do anything more. She saw the line of the lips curl up infinitesimally at the corners. Then a nod, no more than a jot of movement. A decision.

  The wind died as if it had never been. The face receded into the darkness.

  All was still.

  Motionless, Magda and her father faced each other in the center of the room as the cold and the dark slowly dissipated. A log in the fireplace split lengthwise with a crack like a rifle shot and Magda felt her knees liquefy with the sound. She fell forward and only by luck and desperation was she able to grasp the arm of the wheelchair for support.

  “Are you all right?” Papa said, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was feeling his fingers through the gloves.

  “I will be in a minute.” Her mind recoiled at what she had just experienced. “What was it? My God, what was it?”

  Papa was not listening. “They’re gone. I can’t feel anything in them.” He began to pull the gloves from his fingers.

  His plight galvanized Magda. She straightened and began to push the chair over to the fire, which was springing to life again. She was weak with reaction and fatigue and shock, but that seemed to be of secondary importance.

  What about me? Why am I always second? Why do I always have to be strong?

  Once…just once…she would like to be able to collapse and have someone tend to her. She forcibly submerged the thoughts. That was no way for a daughter to think when her father needed her.

  “Hold them out, Papa! There’s no hot water so we’ll have to depend on the fire to warm them!”

  In the flickering light of the flames she saw that his hands had gone dead white, as white as those of that…thing. Papa’s fingers were stubby with coarse, thick skin and curved, ridged nails. Small punctate depressions marred each fingertip, scars left by tiny areas of healed gangrene. They were the hands of a stranger—Magda could remember when his hands had been graceful, animated, with long, mobile, tapering fingers. A scholar’s hands. A musician’s. They had been living things. Now they were mummified caricatures of life.

  She had to get warmth back into them, but not too quickly. At home in Bucharest she had always kept a pot of warm water on the stove during the winter months for these episodes. The doctors called it Raynaud’s phenomenon; any sudden drop in temperature caused constrictive spasms in the blood vessels of his hands. Nicotine had a similar effect, and so he had been cut off from his beloved cigars. If his tissues were deprived of oxygen too long or too often, gangrene would take root. So far he had been lucky. When gangrene had set in, the areas had been small and he had been able to overcome it. But that would not always be the case.

  She watched as he held his hands out to the fire, rotating them back and forth against the warmth as best his stiff joints would allow. She knew he could feel nothing in them now—too cold and numb. But once circulation returned he would be in agony as his fingers throbbed and tingled and burned as if on fire.

  “Look what they’ve done to you!” she said angrily as the fingers change
d from white to blue.

  Papa looked up questioningly. “I’ve had worse.”

  “I know. But it shouldn’t have happened at all! What are they trying to do to us?”

  “They?”

  “The Nazis! They’re toying with us! Experimenting on us! I don’t know what just happened here…It was very realistic, but it wasn’t real! Couldn’t have been! They hypnotized us, used drugs, dimmed the lights—”

  “It was real, Magda,” Papa said, his voice soft with wonder, confirming what she knew in her soul, what she had so wanted him to deny. “Just as those forbidden books are real. I know—”

  Breath suddenly hissed through his teeth as blood began to flow into his fingers again, turning them dark red. The starved tissues punished him as they gave up their accumulated toxins. Magda had been through this with him so many times she could almost feel the pain herself.

  When the throbbing subsided to an endurable level, he continued, his words coming in gasps.

  “I spoke to him in Old Slavonic…told him we were not his enemies…told him to leave us alone…and he left.” He grimaced in pain a moment, then looked at Magda with bright, glittering eyes. His voice was low and hoarse. “It’s him, Magda. I know it! It’s him!”

  Magda said nothing. But she knew it, too.

  FIFTEEN

  THE KEEP

  Wednesday, 30 April

  0622 hours

  Captain Woermann had tried to stay awake through the night but failed. He had seated himself at the window overlooking the courtyard with his Luger unholstered in his lap, though he doubted a 9mm Parabellum would help against whatever haunted the keep. Too many sleepless nights and too little fitful napping during the days had caught up with him again.

  He awoke with a start, disoriented. For a moment he thought he was back in Rathenow, with Helga down in the kitchen cooking eggs and sausage, and the boys already up and out and milking the cows. But he had been dreaming.