F. Paul Wilson - The Keep

He scanned the rest of the room. The girl wasn't there—probably in the back. This room seemed smaller than his own, two stories up ... maybe it was just an impression created by the clutter of the books and the luggage.

"Is this morning an example of what we must face to get drinking water?" the waxy masked old man said through his tiny mouth, his voice dry, scaly. "Is my daughter to be assaulted every time she leaves the room?"

"That has been taken care of," Woermann told him. "The man will be punished." He stared at Kaempffer, who had sauntered to the other side of the room. "I can assure you it will not happen again."

"I hope not," Cuza replied. "It is difficult enough trying to find any useful information in these texts under the best conditions. But to labor under the threat of physical abuse at any moment... the mind rebels."

"It had better not rebel, Jew!" Kaempffer said. "It had better do as it is told!"

"It's just that it's impossible for me to concentrate on these texts when I'm worried about my daughter's safety. That should not be too hard to grasp."

Woermann sensed that the professor was aiming an appeal at him but he was not sure what it was.

"It's unavoidable, I'm afraid," he told the old man. "She is the only woman on what is essentially an army base. I don't like it any more than you. A woman doesn't belong here. Unless..." A thought struck him. He glanced at Kaempffer. "We'll put her up in the inn. She could take a couple of the books with her and study them on her own, and come back to confer with her father."

"Out of the question!" Kaempffer said. "She stays here where we can keep an eye on her." He approached Cuza at the table. "Right now I'm interested in what you learned last night that kept us all alive!"

"I don't understand..."

"No one died last night," Woermann said. He watched for reaction in the old man's face; it was difficult, perhaps impossible, to discern a change of expression in that tight, immobile skin. But he thought he saw the eyes widen almost imperceptibly in surprise.

"Magda!" he called. "Come here!"

The door to the rear room opened and the girl appeared. She looked composed after the incident on the cellar steps, but he saw that her hand trembled as it rested on the doorframe.

"Yes, Papa?"

"There were no deaths last night!" Cuza said. "It must have been one of those incantations I was reading!"

"Last night?" the girl's expression betrayed an instant of confusion, and something else: a fleeting horror at the mention of last night. She locked eyes with her father and a signal seemed to pass between them, perhaps the tiniest nod from the old man, then her face lit up.

"Wonderful! I wonder which incantation?"

Incantation? Woermann thought. He would have laughed at this conversation last Monday.

It smacked of a belief in spells and black magic. But now ...he would accept anything that got them all through the night alive. Anything.

"Let me see this incantation," Kaempffer said, interest lighting his eyes.

"Certainly." Cuza pulled over a weighty tome. "This is De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludwig Prinn. It's in Latin." He glanced up. "Do you read Latin, Major?"

A tightening of the lips was Kaempffer's only reply.

"A shame," the professor said. "Then I shall translate for—"

"You're lying to me, aren't you, Jew?" Kaempffer said softly.

But Cuza was not to be intimidated, and Woermann had to admire him for his courage. "The answer is here!" he cried, pointing to the pile of books before him. "Last night proves it. I still don't know what haunts the keep, but with a little time, a little peace, and fewer interruptions, I'm sure I can find out. Now, good day, gentlemen!"

He adjusted his thick glasses and pulled the book closer. Woermann hid a smile at Kaempffer's impotent rage and spoke before the major could do anything rash.

"I think it would be in our best interests to leave the professor to the task he was brought here for, don't you, Major?"

Kaempffer clasped his hands behind him and strode through the door. Woermann took one last look at the professor and his daughter before following. They were hiding something, those two. Whether about the keep itself or the murderous entity that stalked its corridors at night, he could not say. And right now it really didn't matter. As long as no more of his men died in the night, they were welcome to their secret. He was not sure he ever wanted to know. But should the deaths begin again, he would demand a full accounting.

Professor Cuza pushed the book away from him as soon as the door closed behind the captain. He rubbed the fingers of his hands one at a time, each in turn.

Mornings were the worst. That was when everything hurt, especially the hands. Each knuckle was like a rusted hinge on the door to an abandoned woodshed, protesting with pain and noise at the slightest disturbance, fiercely resisting any change in position. But it wasn't just his hands. All his joints hurt. Awakening, rising, and getting into the wheelchair that circumscribed his life was a chorus of agony from the hips, the knees, the wrists, the elbows, and the shoulders. Only by midmorning, after two separate doses of aspirin and perhaps some codeine when he had it, did the pain in his inflamed connective tissues subside to a tolerable level. He no longer thought of his body as flesh and blood; he saw it as a piece of clockwork that had been left out in the rain and was now irreparably damaged.

Then there was the dry mouth which never let up. The doctors had told him it was "not uncommon for scleroderma patients to experience a marked decrease in the volume of salivary secretions." They said it so matter-of-factly, but there was nothing matter-of-fact about living with a tongue that always tasted like plaster of Paris. He tried to keep some water at hand at all times; if he didn't sip occasionally his voice began to sound like old shoes dragging across a sandy floor.

Swallowing, too, was a chore. Even the water had trouble going down. And food—he had to chew everything until his jaw muscles cramped and then hope it wouldn't get stuck halfway to his stomach.

It was no way to live, and he had more than once considered putting an end to the whole charade. But he had never made the attempt. Possibly because he lacked the courage; possibly because he still possessed enough courage to face life on whatever terms he was offered. He wasn't sure which.

"You all right, Papa?"

He looked up at Magda. She stood near the fireplace with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, shivering. It wasn't from the cold. He knew she had been badly shaken by their visitor last night and had hardly slept. Neither had he. But then to be assaulted not thirty feet from her sleeping quarters...

Savages! What he would give to see them all dead—not just the ones here, but every stinking Nazi who stepped outside his border! And those still inside the German border as well. He wished for a way to exterminate them before they could exterminate him. But what could he do? A crippled scholar who looked half again his real age, who could not even defend his own daughter—what could he do?

Nothing. He wanted to scream, to break something, to bring down the walls as Samson had done. He wanted to cry. He cried too easily of late, despite his lack of tears. That wasn't manly. But then, he wasn't much of a man anymore.

"I'm fine, Magda," he said. "No better, no worse than usual. It's you that worries me. This is no place for you—no place for any woman."

She sighed. "I know. But there's no way to leave here until they let us."

"Always the devoted daughter," he said, feeling a burst of warmth for her. Magda was loving and loyal, strong-willed yet dutiful. He wondered what he had ever done to deserve her. "I wasn't talking about us. I was talking about you. I want you to leave the keep as soon as it's dark."