"So?"
"It's fading out." He glanced at Flick and then back down the corridor. "Now the second one's fading!" His voice rose half an octave as he lifted his Schmeisser and cocked it. "Get over here!"
Flick dropped the key, swung his own weapon to the ready position, and ran to join his companion. By the time he reached the juncture of the two corridors, the third light had faded out. He tried but could make out no details of the corridor behind the dead bulbs. It was as if the area had been swallowed by impenetrable darkness.
"I don't like this," Waltz said.
"Neither do I. But I don't see a soul. Maybe it's the generator. Or a bad wire." Flick knew he didn't believe this any more than Waltz did. But he had had to say something to hide his growing fear. Einsatzkommandos were supposed to arouse fear, not feel it.
The fourth bulb began to die. The dark was only a dozen feet away.
"Let's move into here," Flick said, backing into the well-lit recess of the rear corridor. He could hear the prisoners muttering in the last room behind them. Though they could not see the dying bulbs, they sensed something was wrong.
Crouched behind Waltz, Flick shivered in the growing cold as he watched the illumination in the outer corridor continue to fade. He wanted something to shoot at but could see only blackness.
And then the blackness was upon him, freezing his joints and dimming his vision. For an instant that seemed to stretch to a lifetime, Private Karl Flick became a victim of the soulless terror he so loved to inspire in others, felt the deep, gut-tearing pain he so loved to inflict on others. Then he felt nothing.
Slowly the illumination returned to the corridors, first to the rear, then to the access passage. The only sounds came from the villagers trapped in their celclass="underline" whimpering from the women, relieved sobs from the men as they all felt themselves released from the panic that had seized them. One man tentatively approached the door to peer through a tiny space between two boards. His field of vision was limited to a section of floor and part of the rear wall of the corridor.
He could see no movement. The floor was bare except for a splattering of blood, still red, still wet, still steaming in the cold. And on the rear wall there was more blood, but this was smeared instead of splattered. The smears seemed to form a pattern, like letters from an alphabet he almost recognized, forming words that hovered just over the far edge of recognition. Words like dogs howling in the night, naggingly present, but ever out of reach.
The man turned away from the door and rejoined his fellow villagers huddled in the far corner of the room.
There was someone at the door.
Kaempffer's eyes snapped open; he feared that the earlier nightmare was going to repeat itself. But no. He could sense no dark, malevolent presence on the other side of the wall this time. The agent here seemed human. And clumsy. If stealth were the intruder's aim, he was failing miserably. But to be on the safe side, Kaempffer pulled his Luger from the holster coiled at his elbow.
"Who's there?"
No reply.
The rattle of a fumbling hand working the latch continued. Kaempffer could see breaks in the strip of light along the bottom of the door, but they gave no clue as to who might be out there. He considered turning on the lamp, but thought better of it. The dark room gave him an advantage—an intruder would be silhouetted against the light from the hall.
"Identify yourself!"
The fumbling at the latch stopped, to be replaced by a faint creaking and cracking, as if some huge weight were leaning against the door, trying to get through it. Kaempffer couldn't be sure in the dark, but he thought he saw the door bulge inward. That was two-inch oak! It would take massive weight to do that! As the creaking of the wood grew louder, he found himself trembling and sweating. There was nowhere to go. And now there was another sound, as if something were clawing at the door to get in. The noises assailed him, growing louder, paralyzing him. The wood was cracking so that it seemed it must break into a thousand fragments; the hinges cried out as their metal fastenings were tortured from the stone. Something had to give! He knew he should be chambering a shell into his Luger but he could not move.
The latch suddenly screeched and gave way, the door bursting open and slamming against the wall. Two figures stood outlined in the light from the hall. By their helmets, Kaempffer knew them to be German soldiers, and by their jackboots he knew them to be two of the einsatzkommandos he had brought with him. He should have relaxed at the sight of them, but for some reason he did not. What were they doing breaking into his room?
"Who is it?" he demanded.
They made no reply. Instead, they stepped forward in unison toward where he lay frozen in his bedroll. There was something wrong with their gait—not a gross disorder, but a subtle grotesquery. For one disconcerting moment, Major Kaempffer thought the two soldiers would march right over him. But they stopped at the edge of his bed, simultaneously, as if on command. Neither said a word. Nor did they salute.
"What do you want?" He should have been furious, but the anger did not come. Only fear. Against his wishes, his body was shrinking into the bedroll, trying to hide.
"Speak to me!" It was a plea.
No reply. He reached down with his left hand and found the battery lamp on the floor beside his bed, all the while keeping the Luger in his right trained on the silent pair looming over him. When his questing fingers found the toggle switch, he hesitated, listening to his own rasping respirations. He had to see who they were and what they wanted, but a deep part of him warned against turning on the light.
Finally, he could stand it no longer. With a groan, he flicked the toggle and held the lamp up.
Privates Flick and Waltz stood over him, faces white and contorted, eyes glazed. A gaping crescent of torn and bloodied flesh grinned down at him from the place where each man's throat had been. No one moved ... the two dead soldiers wouldn't, Kaempffer couldn't. For a long, heart-stopping moment, Kaempffer lay paralyzed, the lamp held aloft in his hand, his mouth working spasmodically around a scream of fear that could not pass his locked throat.
Then there was motion. Silently, almost gracefully, the two soldiers leaned forward and fell onto their commanding officer, pinning him in his bedroll under hundreds of pounds of limp dead flesh.
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 Woermann. Instead, he concentrated on the glass of kummel pressed between both palms. He had downed the first half in one gulp and now sipped steadily at the rest. By slow, painful degrees he was beginning to feel that he had himself under control again. It helped that he was in Woermann's quarters and not his own.
"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.