The Keep

Magda shook her head in an attempt to clear it. This was becoming more incredible every minute!

"But the hilt—where is it? What does it look like?"

"You've seen its image thousands of times in the walls of the keep."

"The crosses!" Magda's mind whirled. Then they weren't crosses after all! They were modeled on the hilt of a sword—no wonder the crosspiece was set so high! She had been looking at them for years and had never even come close to guessing. And if Molasar—or should she start thinking of him as Rasalom now?—were truly the source of the vampire legends, she could see how his fear of the sword hilt might have been transmuted into a fear of the cross in the folk tales. "But where—"

"Buried deep in the subcellar. As long as the hilt remains within the walls of the keep, Rasalom is bound by them."

"But all he has to do is dig it up and dispose of it."

"He can't touch it, or even get too close to it."

"Then he's trapped forever!"

"No," Gle

Magda wanted to be sick, to shout No! at the top of her lungs, but she could not. She had been turned to stone by Gle

"Let me tell you what I think has happened," he said into the lengthening silence. "Rasalom was released the first night the Germans moved into the keep. He had strength enough then to kill only one. After that he rested and took stock. His initial strategy, I think, was to kill them one at a time, to feed on that daily agony and on the fear that increased among the living each time he claimed one of them. He was careful not to kill too many at once, especially not the officers, for that might drive them all away. He probably hoped for one of three things to occur: The Germans would become so frustrated that they would blow up the keep, thereby freeing him; or they would bring in more and more reinforcements, affording him more lives to take, more fear to grow strong on; or that he might find among the men a corruptible i

Magda could barely hear her own voice. "Papa."

"Or you. From what you told me, Rasalom's attention seemed to be centered on you when he first revealed himself. But the captain put you over here, out of reach. Therefore Rasalom had to concentrate on your father."

"But he could have used one of the soldiers!"

"He gains his greatest strength from the destruction of everything that is good in a person. The corruption of the values of a single decent human being enriches him more than a thousand murders. It's a feast for Rasalom! The soldiers were useless to him. Veterans of Poland and other campaigns, they had killed proudly for their Führer. Little of value in them for Rasalom. And their reinforcements—death camp troopers! Nothing left in those creatures to debase! So the only real use he's had for the Germans, besides the fear and death-agony gleaned from them, is as digging tools."

Magda couldn't imagine... "Digging?"

"To unearth the hilt. I suspect that the 'thing' you heard shuffling around in the subcellar after your father sent you away was a group of the dead soldiers returning to their shrouds."

Walking corpses ... the thought was grotesque, too fantastic even to consider, and yet she remembered that story the major had told about the two dead soldiers who had walked from the place of their dying to his room.

"But if he has the power to make the dead walk, why can't he have one of them dispose of the hilt?"

"Impossible. The hilt negates his power. A corpse under his control would return to its inanimate state the instant it touched the hilt." He paused. "Your father will be the one to carry the hilt from the keep."

"But as soon as Papa touches the hilt, won't Rasalom lose control over him?"

Gle

Magda felt dead inside. "But Papa doesn't know! Why didn't you tell him?"

"Because it was his battle, not mine. And because I couldn't risk letting Rasalom know I was here. Your father wouldn't have believed me anyway—he preferred to hate me. Rasalom has done a masterful job on him, destroying his character by tiny increments, peeling away layer after layer of all the things he believed in, leaving only the base, venal aspects of his nature."

It was true. Magda had seen it happening and had been afraid to admit it, but it was true!

"You could have helped him!"

"Perhaps. But I doubt it. Your father's battle was against himself as much as against Rasalom. And in the end, evil must be faced alone. Your father made excuses for the evil he sensed within Rasalom, and soon he came to see Rasalom as the answer to all his problems. Rasalom started with your father's religion. He does not fear the cross, yet he pretended to, causing your father to question his entire heritage, undermining all the beliefs and values derived from that heritage. Then Rasalom rescued you from your would-be rapists—a testimony to the quickness and adaptability of his mind—putting your father deep in his debt. Rasalom went on to promise him a chance to destroy Nazism and save your people. And then, the final stroke—the elimination of all the symptoms of the disease your father has suffered with for years. Rasalom had a willing slave then, one who would do just about anything he asked. He has not only stripped away most of the man you called 'Papa,' but has fashioned him into an instrument that will effect the release of mankind's greatest enemy from the keep."

Gle

"Let him go," Magda said through her misery as she contemplated what had happened to Papa—or rather, what Papa had allowed to happen to himself. She had to wonder: Would she or anybody else have been able to withstand such an assault on one's character? "Perhaps that will free my father from Rasalom's influence and we can go back to the way we were."

"You will have no lives to go about if Rasalom is set free!"

"In this world of Hitler and the Iron Guard, what can Rasalom do that hasn't been done already?"

"You haven't been listening!" Gle

"Nothing could be worse than Hitler!" Magda said. "Nothing!"

"Rasalom could. Don't you see, Magda, that with Hitler, as evil as he is, there is still hope? Hitler is but a man. He is mortal. He will die or be killed someday ... maybe tomorrow, maybe thirty years from now, but he will die. He only controls a small part of the world. And although he appears invincible now, he has yet to deal with Russia. Britain still defies him. And there is America—if those Americans decide to turn their vitality and productive capacity to war, no country, not even Hitler's Germany, will be able to stand against them for long. So you see, there is still hope in this very dark hour."

Magda nodded slowly. What Gle

"Rasalom, as I told you, feeds on human debasement. And never in the history of humankind has there been such a glut of it as there is today in eastern Europe. As long as the hilt remains within the keep walls, Rasalom is not only trapped, but is insulated from what goes on outside. Remove the hilt and it will all rush in on him at once—all the death, misery, and butchery of Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz, and all the other death camps, all the monstrousness of modern war. He'll absorb it like a sponge, feast on it and grow incredibly strong. His power will balloon beyond all comprehension.