"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."
"I'm not too good at scaling walls, Papa." Her smile was wan. "And I've no intention of trying to seduce the guard at the gate. I wouldn't know how."
"The escape route lies right below our feet. Remember?"
Her eyes widened. "Oh, yes. I'd forgotten about that!"
"How could you forget? You found it."
It had happened on their last trip to the pass. He had still been able to get about on his own then but had needed two canes to bolster the failing strength in his legs. Unable to go himself, he had sent Magda down into the gorge in search of a cornerstone at the base of the keep, or perhaps a stone with an inscription on it... anything to give him a clue as to the builders of the keep. There had been no inscription. But Magda had come across a large, flat stone in the wall at the very base of the watchtower; it had moved when she leaned against it. It was hinged on the left and perfectly balanced. Sunlight pouring through the opening had revealed a set of stairs leading upward.
Over his protests she had insisted on exploring the base of the tower in the hope that some old records might have been left within. All she found was a long, steep, winding set of stairs that ended in a seemingly blind niche in the ceiling of the base. But it was not a blind end—the niche was in the very wall that divided the two rooms they now occupied. Within it, Magda discovered another perfectly balanced stone, scored to look like the smaller rectangular blocks that made up the rest of the wall, which swung open into the larger of the two rooms, permitting secret ingress and egress from the bottom suite of the tower.