F. Paul Wilson - The Keep

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 backwards 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 it was the eyes, gripping Magda more fiercely than the icy hand on her arm, killing off her wailing cry and stilling her frantic struggles.

The 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. There was 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 ... non-melodic, 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 up!"

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. There were small punctate depressions in 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 them warmed up, 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.