She drew the blanket closer around her. All she could do was wait.
Magda's eyelids began to droop—the aftereffects of the concussion and the rhythmic sounds of Glenn's breathing lulled her. She struggled briefly, then succumbed ... just for a moment... just to rest her eyes.
Klaus Woermann knew he was dead. And yet... not dead.
He clearly remembered his dying. He had been strangled with deliberate slowness here in the subcellar in darkness lit only by the feeble glow of his fallen flashlight. Icy fingers with incalculable strength had closed on his throat, choking off the air until his blood had thundered in his ears and blackness had closed in.
But not eternal blackness. Not yet.
He could not understand his continued awareness. He lay on his back, his eyes open and staring into the darkness. He did not know how long he had been this way. Time had lost all meaning. Except for his vision, he was cut off from the rest of his body. It was as if it belonged to someone else. He could feel nothing, not the rocky earth against his back or the cold air against his face. He could hear nothing. He was not breathing. He could not move—not even a finger. When a rat had crawled over his face, dragging its matted fur across his eyes, he could not even blink.
He was dead. And yet not dead.
Gone was all fear, all pain. He was devoid of all feeling except regret. He had ventured into the subcellar to find redemption and had found only horror and death—his own death.
Woermann suddenly realized that he was being moved. Although he could still feel nothing, he sensed he was being roughly dragged through the darkness by the back of his tunic, along a narrow passage, into a dark room—
—and into light.
Woermann's line of vision was along the limp length of his body. As he was dragged along a corridor strewn with granite rubble, his gaze swept across a wall he immediately recognized—a wall upon which words of an ancient tongue had been written in blood. The wall had been washed but brown smudges were still visible on the stone.
He was dropped to the floor. His field of vision was now limited to a section of the partially dismantled ceiling directly above him. At the periphery of his vision, moving about, was a dark shape. Woermann saw a length of heavy rope snake over an exposed ceiling beam, saw a loop of that same rope go over his face, and then he was moving again...
... upward...
... until his feet left the ground and his lifeless body began to sway and swing and twist in the air. A shadowy figure melted into a doorway down the corridor and Woermann was left alone, hanging by his neck from a rope.
He wanted to scream a protest to God. For he now knew that the dark being who ruled the keep was waging war not only against the bodies of the soldiers who had entered his domain, but against their minds and their spirits as well.
And Woermann realized the role he was being forced to play in that war: a suicide. His men would think he had killed himself! It would completely demoralize them. Their officer, the man they looked to for leadership, had hanged himself—the ultimate cowardice, the ultimate desertion.
He could not allow that to happen. And yet he could do nothing to alter the course of events. He was dead.
Was this to be his penance for closing his eyes to the monstrousness of the war? If so, it was too much—too much to pay! To hang here and watch his own men and the einsatzkommandos come and gawk at him. And the final ignominy: to see Erich Kaempffer smiling up at him!
Was this why he had been left teetering on the edge of eternal oblivion? To witness his own humiliation as a suicide?
If only he could do something!
One final act to redeem his pride and—yes—his manhood. One last gesture to give meaning to his death.
Something!
Anything!
But all he could do was hang and sway and wait to be found.
Cuza looked up as a grating sound filled the room. The section of the wall that led into the base of the tower was swinging open. When it stopped moving, Molasar's voice came from the darkness beyond.
"All is ready."
At last! The wait had been almost unbearable. As the hours had edged by, Cuza had almost given up on seeing Molasar again tonight. Never had he been a patient man, but at no time could he remember being so consumed by an urgency such as he had known tonight. He had tried to distract himself by dredging up worries about how Magda was faring after that blow to the head ... it was no use. The coming destruction of "Lord Hitler" banished all other considerations from his mind. Cuza had paced the length, breadth, and perimeters of both rooms again and again, obsessed by his fierce longing to get on with it and yet unable to do a thing until word came from Molasar.
And now Molasar was here. As Cuza ducked through the opening, leaving his wheelchair behind forever, he felt a cold metal cylinder pressed against the bare skin of his palm.
"What—?" It was a flashlight.
"You will need this."
Cuza switched the flashlight on. It was German Army issue. The lens was cracked. He wondered who—
"Follow me."
Molasar surefootedly led the way down the winding steps that clung to the inner surface of the tower wall. He did not seem to need any light to find his way. Cuza did. He stayed close behind Molasar, keeping the flashlight beam trained on the steps before him. He wished he could take a moment to look around. For a long time, he had desperately wanted to explore the base of the tower and until now had had to do so vicariously through Magda. But there was no time to drink in the details. When all this was over he promised himself to return here and do a thorough inspection on his own.
After a while they came to a narrow opening in the wall. He followed Molasar through and found himself in the subcellar. Molasar quickened his pace and Cuza had to strain to keep up. But he voiced no complaint, so thankful was he to be able to walk at all, to brave the cold without his hands losing their circulation or his arthritic joints seizing up on him. He was actually working up a sweat! Wonderful!
Off to his right he saw light filtering down the stairway up to the cellar. He flashed his lamp to the left. The corpses were gone. The Germans must have shipped them out. Strange, their leaving the shrouds in a pile there.
Over the sound of his hurried footsteps Cuza began to hear another noise. A faint scraping. As he followed Molasar out of the large cavern that made up the sub-cellar and into a narrower, tunnellike passage, the sound became progressively louder. He trailed Molasar through various turns until, after one particularly sharp left turn, Molasar stopped and beckoned Cuza to his side. The scraping sound was loud, echoing all about them.
"Prepare yourself," Molasar said, his expression unreadable. "I have made certain use of the remains of the dead soldiers. What you see next may offend you, but it was necessary to retrieve my talisman. I could have found another way, but this was convenient ... and fitting."
Cuza doubted there was much Molasar could do with the bodies of German soldiers that would truly offend him.
He then followed him into a large hemispherical chamber with a roof of icy living rock and a dirt floor. A deep excavation had been sunk into the middle of that floor. And still the scraping, louder. Where was it coming from? Cuza looked about, the beam from his flashlight reflecting off the glistening walls and ceiling, diffusing light throughout the chamber.
He noticed movement near his feet and all around the periphery of the excavation. Small movements. He gasped—rats! Hundreds of rats surrounded the pit, squirming and jostling one another, agitated ... expectant...
Cuza saw something much larger than a rat crawling up the wall of the excavation. He stepped forward and pointed the flashlight directly into the pit—and almost dropped it. It was like looking into one of the outer rings of Hell. Feeling suddenly weak, he lurched away from the edge and pressed his shoulder against the nearest wall to keep from toppling over. He closed his eyes and panted like a dog on a stifling August day, trying to calm himself, trying to hold down his rising gorge, trying to accept what he had seen.