F. Paul Wilson - The Keep

The night was chilly. To make matters worse, fog had seeped in through the barred gate and hung in the air around him, sheening the metal surface of his helmet with droplets of moisture. Schreck rubbed a hand across his eyes. Mostly he was tired. Tired of everything that had to do with the army. War wasn't what he had thought it would be. When he had joined up two years ago he had been eighteen with a head full of dreams of sound and fury, of great battles and noble victories, of huge armies clashing on fields of honor. That was the way it had always been in the history books. But real war hadn't turned out that way. Real war was mostly waiting. And the waiting was usually dirty, cold, nasty, and wet. Rudy Schreck had had his fill of war. He wanted to be home in Treysa. His parents were there, and so was a girl named Eva who hadn't been writing as often as she used to. He wanted his own life back again, a life in which there were no uniforms and no inspections, no drills, no sergeants, and no officers. And no watch duty.

He was coming to the rear corner of the courtyard on the northern side. The shadows looked deeper than ever there ... much deeper than on his last turn. Schreck slowed his pace as he approached. This is silly, he thought. Just a trick of the light. Nothing to be afraid of.

And yet... he didn't want to go in there. He wanted to skirt this particular corner. He'd go into all the other corners, but not this one.

Squaring his shoulders, Schreck forced himself forward. It was only shadow.

He was a grown man, too old to be afraid of the dark. He continued straight ahead, maintaining an arm's length from the wall, into the shadowed corner—

—and suddenly he was lost. Cold, sucking blackness closed in on him. He spun around to go back the way he had come but found only more blackness. It was as though the rest of the world had disappeared. Schreck pulled the Schmeisser off his shoulder and held it ready to fire. He was shivering with cold yet sweating profusely. He wanted to believe this was all a trick, that Wehner had somehow turned off all the lights at the instant he had entered the shadow. But Schreck's senses dashed that hope. The darkness was too complete—it pressed against his eyes and wormed its way into his courage.

There was someone approaching. Schreck could neither see nor hear him, but someone was there. Coming closer.

"Wehner?" he said softly, hoping his terror didn't show in his voice. "Is that you, Wehner?"

But it wasn't Wehner. Schreck realized that as the presence neared. It was someone—thing—else. What felt like a length of heavy rope suddenly coiled around his ankles. As he was yanked off his feet, Private Rudy Schreck began screaming and firing wildly until the darkness ended the war for him.

Woermann was jolted awake by a short sputtering burst from a Schmeisser. He sprang to the window overlooking the courtyard. One of the guards was running toward the rear. Where was the other? Damn! He had posted two guards in the courtyard! He was just about to turn and run for the stairs when he saw something on the wall. A pale lump... it almost looked like...

It was a body ... upside down ... a naked body hanging from a rope tied to its feet. Even from his tower window Woermann could see the blood that had run down from the throat over the face. One of his soldiers, fully armed and on patrol, had been slaughtered and stripped and hung up like a chicken in a butcher's window.

The fear that had so far only been nibbling at Woermann now asserted an icy, viselike grip on him.

Friday, 25 April

Three dead men in the subcellar. Defense command at Ploiesti had been notified of the latest mortality but no comment had been radioed back.

There was much activity in the courtyard during the day, but little accomplished. Woermann decided to pair the guards tonight. It seemed incredible that a partisan guerrilla could take an alert, seasoned soldier by surprise at his post, but it had happened. It would not happen with a pair of sentries.

In the afternoon he returned to his canvas and found a bit of relief from the atmosphere of doom that had settled on the keep. He began adding blotches of shadow to the blank gray of the wall, and then detail to the edges of the window. He had decided to leave out the crosses since they would be a distraction from the village, which he wanted to be the focus. He worked like an automaton, narrowing his world to the brushstrokes on the canvas, shutting away the terror around him.

Night came quietly. Woermann kept getting up from his bedroll and going to the window overlooking the courtyard, a useless routine but a compulsion, as if he could keep everyone alive by maintaining a personal watch on the keep. On one of his trips to the window, he noticed the courtyard sentry walking his tour alone. Rather than call down and cause a disturbance, he decided to investigate personally.

"Where's your partner?" he asked the lone sentry when he reached the courtyard.

The soldier whirled, then began to stammer. "He was tired, sir. I let him take a rest."

An uneasy feeling clawed at Woermann's belly. "I gave orders for all sentries to travel in pairs! Where is he?"

"In the cab of the first lorry, sir."

Woermann quickly crossed to the parked vehicle and pulled open the door. The soldier within did not move. Woermann poked at his arm.

"Wake up."

The soldier began to lean toward him, slowly at first, then with greater momentum until he was actually falling toward his commanding officer. Woermann caught him and then almost dropped him. For as he fell, his head angled back to reveal an open, mangled throat. Woermann eased the body to the ground, then stepped back, clamping his jaw against a scream of fright and horror.

Saturday, 26 April

Woermann had Alexandru and his sons turned away at the gate in the morning. Not that he suspected them of complicity in the deaths, but Sergeant Oster had warned him that the men were edgy about their inability to maintain security. Woermann thought it best to avoid a potentially ugly incident.

He soon learned that the men were edgy about more than security. Late in the morning a brawl broke out in the courtyard. A corporal tried to pull rank on a private to make him give up a specially blessed crucifix. The private refused and a fight between two men escalated into a brawl involving a dozen. It seemed there had been small talk about vampires after the first death; it had been ridiculed then. But with each new baffling death the idea had gained credence until believers now outnumbered nonbelievers. This was, after all, Romania, the Transylvanian Alps.

Woermann knew he had to nip this in the bud. He gathered the men in the courtyard and spoke to them for half an hour. He told them of their duty as German soldiers to remain brave in the face of danger, to remain true to their cause, and not to let fear turn them against one another, for that would surely lead to defeat.

"And finally," he said, noticing his audience becoming restive, "you must all put aside fear of the supernatural. There is a human agent at work in these deaths and we will find him or them. It is now plain that there must be a number of secret passages within the keep that allows the killer to enter and leave without being seen. We'll spend the rest of the day searching for those passages. And I am assigning half of you to guard duty tonight. We are going to put a stop to this once and for all!"

The men's spirits seemed to be lifted by his words. In fact, he had almost convinced himself.

He moved about the keep constantly during the rest of the day, encouraging the men, watching them measure floors and walls in search of dead spaces, tapping the walls for hollow sounds. But they found nothing. He personally made a quick reconnaissance of the cavern in the subcellar. It appeared to recede into the heart of the mountain; he decided to leave it unexplored for now. There was no time, and no signs of disturbance in the dirt of the cavern floor to indicate that anyone had passed this way in ages. He left orders, however, to place four men on guard at the opening to the subcellar in the unlikely event that someone might try to gain entrance through the cavern below.