The Keep

Then there was motion. Silently, almost gracefully, the two soldiers leaned forward and fell onto their commanding officer, pi

As Kaempffer struggled frantically to pull himself out from under the two corpses, he heard a far-off voice begin to wail in mortal panic. An isolated part of his brain focused on the sound until he had identified it.

The voice was his own.

"Now do you believe?"

"Believe what?" Kaempffer refused to look up at Woerma

"That SS methods will not solve this problem."

"SS methods always work."

"Not this time."

"I've only begun! No villagers have died yet!"

Even as he spoke, Kaempffer admitted to himself that he had run up against a situation completely beyond the experience of anyone in the SS. There were no precedents, no one he could turn to for advice. There was something in the keep beyond fear, beyond coercion. Something magnificently adept at using fear as its own weapon. This was no guerrilla group, no fanatic arm of the National Peasant Party. This was something beyond war, beyond nationality, beyond race.

Yet the village prisoners would have to die at dawn. He could not let them go—to do so would be to admit defeat, and he and the SS would lose face. He must never allow that to happen. It made no difference that their deaths would have no effect on the ... thing that was killing the men. They had to die.

"And they won't die," Woerma

"What?" Kaempffer finally looked up from the glass of kummel.

"The villagers—I let them go."

"How dare you!" Anger—he began to feel alive again. He rose from his chair.

"You'll thank me later on when you don't have the systematic murder of an entire Romanian village to explain. And that's what it would come to. I know your kind. Once started on a course, no matter how futile, no matter how many you hurt, you keep going rather than admit you've made a mistake. So I'm keeping you from getting started. Now you can blame your failure on me. I will accept the blame and we can all find a safer place to quarter ourselves."

Kaempffer sat down again, mentally conceding that Woerma

"I'm not giving up," he told Woerma

"What else can you do? You can't fight this!"

"I will fight it!"

"How?" Woerma

"With guns! With fire! With—" Kaempffer shrank away as Woerma

"Listen to me, Herr Sturmba

Kaempffer shuddered at the memory. "They didn't die until they got to my room! Out of loyalty they came to report to me despite their mortal wounds!" He didn't believe a word of it. The explanation came automatically.

"They were dead, my friend," Woerma

"Then they were carried!" Despite what he had seen with his own eyes he pressed for another explanation. The dead didn't walk. They couldn't!

Woerma

"Do they also teach you to lie to yourself in the SS?"

Kaempffer made no reply. He needed no physical examination of the corpses to know that they had been dead when they had walked into his room. He had known that the instant the light from his lamp had shone on their faces.

Woerma

"NO!" The word passed his lips louder and shriller than he wished.

"You don't really intend to stay here, do you?" Woerma

"I must complete this mission!"

"But you can't! You'll lose! Surely you see that now!"

"I see only that I shall have to change my methods."

"Only a madman would stay!"

I don't want to stay! Kaempffer thought. I want to leave as much as anyone! Under any other circumstances he would be giving the order to move out himself. But that was not one of his options here. He had to settle the matter of the keep—settle it once and for all—before he could leave for Ploiesti. If he bungled this job, there were dozens of his fellow SS officers lusting after the Ploiesti project, watching and waiting to leap at the first sign of weakness and wrest the prize away from him. He had to succeed here. If he could not, he would be left behind, forgotten in some rear office as others in the SS took over management of the world.

And he needed Woerma

"What do you think it is, Klaus?" he asked softly.

"What do I think what is?" Woerma

"The killing—who or what do you think is doing it?"

Woerma

"Come now, Klaus. You've been here a week ... you must have formed an idea." Keep talking, he told himself. The longer you talk, the longer before you've got to return to that room.

"The men think it's a vampire."

A vampire! This was not the kind of talk he needed, but he fought to keep his voice low, his expression friendly.

"Do you agree?"

"Last week—God, even three days ago—I'd have said no. Now, I'm not so sure. I'm no longer sure of anything. If it is a vampire, it's not like the ones you read about in horror stories. Or see in the movies. The only thing I'm sure of is that the killer is not human."

Kaempffer tried to recall what he knew about vampire lore. Was the thing that killed the men drinking their blood? Who could tell? Their throats were such a ruin, and there was so much spilled on their clothes, it would take a medical laboratory to determine whether some of the blood was missing. He had once seen a pirated print of the silent movie, Nosferatu, and had watched the American version of Dracula with German subtitles. That had been years ago, and at the time the idea of a vampire had seemed as ludicrous as it deserved to be. But now ... there certainly was no beak-nosed Slav in formal dress slinking around the keep. But there were most certainly eight corpses in the subcellar. Yet he could not see himself arming his men with wooden stakes and hammers.