The Keep

Magda stepped through the front door and found Iuliu standing outside, looking toward the other end of the village.

"Good morning," she said. "Any chance of lunch being served early?"

Iuliu swiveled his bulk to look at her. The expression on his stubbly face was aloof and hostile, as if he could not imagine dignifying such a request with a reply. After a while he turned away again.

Magda followed his gaze down the road to a knot of people outside one of the village huts.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Nothing that would interest an outsider," Iuliu replied in a surly tone. Then he seemed to change his mind. "But perhaps you should know." There was a malicious slant to his smile. "Alexandra's boys have been fighting with each other. One is dead and the other badly hurt."

"How awful!" Magda said. She had met Alexandru and his sons, questioned them about the keep a number of times. They had all seemed so close. She was as shocked by the news of the death as she was by the pleasure Iuliu seemed to have taken in telling her.

"Not awful, Domnisoara Cuza. Alexandru and his family have long thought themselves better than the rest of us. Serves them right!" His eyes narrowed. "And it serves as a lesson to outsiders who come here thinking themselves better than the people who live here."

Magda backed away from the threat in Iuliu's voice. He had always been such a placid fellow. What had gotten into him?

She turned and walked around the i

Gle

Worried and despondent, Magda walked back to the i

"Help me!"

Magda started toward her but Iuliu appeared at the doorway and pulled her back.

"You stay here!" he told Magda gruffly, then turned toward the injured woman. "Go away, Ioan!"

"I'm hurt!" she cried. "Matei stabbed me!"

Magda saw that the woman's left arm hung limp at her side and her clothing—it looked like a nightgown—was soaked with blood on the left side from shoulder to knee.

"Don't bring your troubles here," Iuliu told her. "We have our own."

The woman continued forward. "Help me, please!"

Iuliu stepped away from the door and picked up an apple-sized rock.

"No!" Magda cried and reached to stay his arm.

Iuliu elbowed her aside and threw the rock, grunting with the force he put behind it. Fortunately for the woman his aim was poor and the missile whizzed harmlessly past her head. But its message was not lost on her. With a sob, she turned and began hobbling away.

Magda started after her. "Wait! I'll help you!"

But Iuliu grabbed her roughly by the arm and shoved her through the doorway into the i

"You'll mind your business!" he shouted. "I don't need anyone bringing trouble to my house! Now get upstairs and stay there!"

"You can't—" Magda began, but then saw Iuliu step forward with bared teeth and a raised arm. Frightened, she leaped to her feet and retreated to the stairs.

What had come over Iuliu? He was a different person! The whole village seemed to have fallen under a vicious spell—stabbings, killings, and no one willing to give the slightest aid to a neighbor in need. What was happening here?

Once upstairs, Magda went directly to Gle

Still empty.

Where was he?

She wandered about the tiny room. She checked the closet and found everything as it had been yesterday—the clothes, the case with the hiltless sword blade in it, the mirror. The mirror bothered her. She looked over to the space above the bureau. The nail was still in the wall there. She reached behind the mirror and found the wire still intact. Which meant it hadn't fallen from the wall; someone had taken it down. Gle

Uneasy, she closed the closet door and left the room. Papa's cruel words of the morning and Gle

Gle

He had seemed greatly disturbed by what Papa had told him this morning. Gle

As the sun sank closer to the mountaintops, Magda became almost frantic. She checked his room again—no change. Disconsolately, she wandered back to her own room and to the window facing the keep. Avoiding the silent nest, her eyes ranged the brush along the edge of the gorge, looking for something, anything that might lead her to Gle

And then she saw movement within the brush to the right of the causeway. Without waiting for a second look to be sure, Magda ran for the stairs. It had to be Gle

Iuliu was nowhere about and she left the i

She found him perched on a rock, watching the keep from the cover of the branches. She wanted to throw her arms around him and laugh because he was safe, and she wanted to scream at him for disappearing without a word.

"Where have you been all day?" Magda asked as she came up behind him, trying her best to keep her voice calm.

He answered without turning around. "Walking. I had some thinking to do, so I took a walk along the floor of the pass. A long walk."

"I missed you."

"And I you." He turned and held out his arm. "There's room enough here for two." His smile was not as wide or as reassuring as it could have been. He seemed strangely subdued, preoccupied.

Magda ducked under his arm and hugged against him. Good ... it felt good within the carapace of that arm. "What's worrying you?"

"A number of things. These leaves for instance." He grabbed a handful from the branches nearest him and crumbled them in his fist. "They're drying out. Dying. And it's only April. And the villagers..."

"It's the keep, isn't it?" Magda said.

"It seems that way, doesn't it? The longer the Germans stay in there, the more they chip away at the interior of the structure, the further the evil within spreads. Or so it seems."

"Or so it seems," Magda echoed him.

"And then there's your father..."

"He worries me, too. I don't want Molasar to turn on him and leave him"—she could not say it; her mind refused to picture it—"like the others."

"Worse things can happen to a man than having his blood drained."

The solemnity of Gle

"He could lose his self."

"Himself?"

"No. Self. His own self. What he is, what he has struggled all his life to be. That can be lost."

"Gle

"Let's suppose something," he said. "Let's suppose that the vampire, or moroi, or undead, as he exists in legend—a spirit confined to the grave by day, rising at night to feed on the blood of the living—is nothing more than the legend you always thought it to be. Suppose instead that the vampire myth is the result of ancient taletellers' attempts to conceptualize something beyond their understanding; that the real basis for the legend is a being who thirsts for nothing so simple as blood, but who feeds instead on human weakness, who thrives on madness and pain, who steadily gains strength and power from human misery, fear, and degradation."