The sound of running feet cut off further thought—the guards had heard the shriek and were coming to investigate. Good ... Woermann had to admit to himself that he was terrified. He couldn't bear to be alone in this room much longer.
Thursday, 24 April
After seeing to it that Grunstadt's body was placed next to Lutz's, Woermann made sure the men were again kept busy all day building cots and tables. He fostered the belief that there was an anti-German partisan group at work in the area. But he found it impossible to convince himself; for he had been on the corridor when the murder had occurred and knew there was no way the killer could have got by him without being seen—unless he could fly or walk through walls. So what was the answer?
He announced that the sentries would be doubled tonight, with extra men posted in and around the barracks to safeguard those who were sleeping.
With the sound of insistent hammering rising from the courtyard below, Woermann took time out in the afternoon to set up one of his canvases. He began to paint. He had to do something to get that awful look on Grunstadt's face out of his mind; it helped to concentrate on mixing his pigments until their color approximated that of the wall in his room. He decided to place the window to the right of center, then spent the better part of two hours in the late afternoon blending the paint and smoothing it onto the canvas, leaving a white area for the village as seen through the window.
That night he slept. After interrupted slumber the first night, and none on the second, his exhausted body fairly collapsed onto his bedroll.
Private Rudy Schreck walked his patrol cautiously and diligently, keeping an eye on Wehner on the far side of the courtyard. Earlier in the evening, two men for this tiny area had seemed a bit much, but as darkness had grown and consolidated its hold on the keep, Schreck found himself glad to have someone within earshot. He and Wehner had worked out a routine: Both would walk the perimeter of the courtyard within an arm's length of the wall, both going clockwise at opposite sides. It kept them always apart, but it meant better surveillance.
Rudy Schreck was not afraid for his life. Uneasy, yes, but not afraid. He was awake, alert; he had a rapid-fire weapon slung over his shoulder and knew how to use it—whoever had killed Otto last night was not going to have a chance against him. Still, he wished for more light in the courtyard. The scattered bulbs spilling stark pools of brightness here and there along the periphery did nothing to dispel the overall gloom. The two rear corners of the courtyard were especially dark wells of blackness.
The night was chilly. To make matters worse, fog had seeped in through the barred gate and hung in the air around him, sheening the metal surface of his helmet with droplets of moisture. Schreck rubbed a hand across his eyes. Mostly he was tired. Tired of everything that had to do with the army. War wasn't what he had thought it would be. When he had joined up two years ago he had been eighteen with a head full of dreams of sound and fury, of great battles and noble victories, of huge armies clashing on fields of honor. That was the way it had always been in the history books. But real war hadn't turned out that way. Real war was mostly waiting. And the waiting was usually dirty, cold, nasty, and wet. Rudy Schreck had had his fill of war. He wanted to be home in Treysa. His parents were there, and so was a girl named Eva who hadn't been writing as often as she used to. He wanted his own life back again, a life in which there were no uniforms and no inspections, no drills, no sergeants, and no officers. And no watch duty.
He was coming to the rear corner of the courtyard on the northern side. The shadows looked deeper than ever there ... much deeper than on his last turn. Schreck slowed his pace as he approached. This is silly, he thought. Just a trick of the light. Nothing to be afraid of.
And yet... he didn't want to go in there. He wanted to skirt this particular corner. He'd go into all the other corners, but not this one.
Squaring his shoulders, Schreck forced himself forward. It was only shadow.
He was a grown man, too old to be afraid of the dark. He continued straight ahead, maintaining an arm's length from the wall, into the shadowed corner—
—and suddenly he was lost. Cold, sucking blackness closed in on him. He spun around to go back the way he had come but found only more blackness. It was as though the rest of the world had disappeared. Schreck pulled the Schmeisser off his shoulder and held it ready to fire. He was shivering with cold yet sweating profusely. He wanted to believe this was all a trick, that Wehner had somehow turned off all the lights at the instant he had entered the shadow. But Schreck's senses dashed that hope. The darkness was too complete—it pressed against his eyes and wormed its way into his courage.
There was someone approaching. Schreck could neither see nor hear him, but someone was there. Coming closer.
"Wehner?" he said softly, hoping his terror didn't show in his voice. "Is that you, Wehner?"
But it wasn't Wehner. Schreck realized that as the presence neared. It was someone—thing—else. What felt like a length of heavy rope suddenly coiled around his ankles. As he was yanked off his feet, Private Rudy Schreck began screaming and firing wildly until the darkness ended the war for him.
Woermann was jolted awake by a short sputtering burst from a Schmeisser. He sprang to the window overlooking the courtyard. One of the guards was running toward the rear. Where was the other? Damn! He had posted two guards in the courtyard! He was just about to turn and run for the stairs when he saw something on the wall. A pale lump... it almost looked like...
It was a body ... upside down ... a naked body hanging from a rope tied to its feet. Even from his tower window Woermann could see the blood that had run down from the throat over the face. One of his soldiers, fully armed and on patrol, had been slaughtered and stripped and hung up like a chicken in a butcher's window.
The fear that had so far only been nibbling at Woermann now asserted an icy, viselike grip on him.
Friday, 25 April
Three dead men in the subcellar. Defense command at Ploiesti had been notified of the latest mortality but no comment had been radioed back.
There was much activity in the courtyard during the day, but little accomplished. Woermann decided to pair the guards tonight. It seemed incredible that a partisan guerrilla could take an alert, seasoned soldier by surprise at his post, but it had happened. It would not happen with a pair of sentries.
In the afternoon he returned to his canvas and found a bit of relief from the atmosphere of doom that had settled on the keep. He began adding blotches of shadow to the blank gray of the wall, and then detail to the edges of the window. He had decided to leave out the crosses since they would be a distraction from the village, which he wanted to be the focus. He worked like an automaton, narrowing his world to the brushstrokes on the canvas, shutting away the terror around him.
Night came quietly. Woermann kept getting up from his bedroll and going to the window overlooking the courtyard, a useless routine but a compulsion, as if he could keep everyone alive by maintaining a personal watch on the keep. On one of his trips to the window, he noticed the courtyard sentry walking his tour alone. Rather than call down and cause a disturbance, he decided to investigate personally.
"Where's your partner?" he asked the lone sentry when he reached the courtyard.
The soldier whirled, then began to stammer. "He was tired, sir. I let him take a rest."
An uneasy feeling clawed at Woermann's belly. "I gave orders for all sentries to travel in pairs! Where is he?"
"In the cab of the first lorry, sir."
Woermann quickly crossed to the parked vehicle and pulled open the door. The soldier within did not move. Woermann poked at his arm.
"Wake up."
The soldier began to lean toward him, slowly at first, then with greater momentum until he was actually falling toward his commanding officer. Woermann caught him and then almost dropped him. For as he fell, his head angled back to reveal an open, mangled throat. Woermann eased the body to the ground, then stepped back, clamping his jaw against a scream of fright and horror.
Saturday, 26 April
Woermann had Alexandru and his sons turned away at the gate in the morning. Not that he suspected them of complicity in the deaths, but Sergeant Oster had warned him that the men were edgy about their inability to maintain security. Woermann thought it best to avoid a potentially ugly incident.
He soon learned that the men were edgy about more than security. Late in the morning a brawl broke out in the courtyard. A corporal tried to pull rank on a private to make him give up a specially blessed crucifix. The private refused and a fight between two men escalated into a brawl involving a dozen. It seemed there had been small talk about vampires after the first death; it had been ridiculed then. But with each new baffling death the idea had gained credence until believers now outnumbered nonbelievers. This was, after all, Romania, the Transylvanian Alps.
Woermann knew he had to nip this in the bud. He gathered the men in the courtyard and spoke to them for half an hour. He told them of their duty as German soldiers to remain brave in the face of danger, to remain true to their cause, and not to let fear turn them against one another, for that would surely lead to defeat.
"And finally," he said, noticing his audience becoming restive, "you must all put aside fear of the supernatural. There is a human agent at work in these deaths and we will find him or them. It is now plain that there must be a number of secret passages within the keep that allows the killer to enter and leave without being seen. We'll spend the rest of the day searching for those passages. And I am assigning half of you to guard duty tonight. We are going to put a stop to this once and for all!"
The men's spirits seemed to be lifted by his words. In fact, he had almost convinced himself.
He moved about the keep constantly during the rest of the day, encouraging the men, watching them measure floors and walls in search of dead spaces, tapping the walls for hollow sounds. But they found nothing. He personally made a quick reconnaissance of the cavern in the subcellar. It appeared to recede into the heart of the mountain; he decided to leave it unexplored for now. There was no time, and no signs of disturbance in the dirt of the cavern floor to indicate that anyone had passed this way in ages. He left orders, however, to place four men on guard at the opening to the subcellar in the unlikely event that someone might try to gain entrance through the cavern below.
Woermann managed to sneak off for an hour during the late afternoon to sketch in the outline of the village. It was his only respite from the growing tension that pressed in on him from all sides. As he worked with the charcoal pencil, he could feel the unease begin to slip away, almost as if the canvas were drawing it out of him. He would have to take some time tomorrow morning to add color, for it was the village as it looked in the early light that he wished to capture.
As the sun sank and the fading light forced him to quit, he felt all the dread and foreboding filter back. With the sun overhead he could easily believe it was a human agent killing his men; he could laugh at talk of vampires. But in the growing darkness, the gnawing fear returned along with the memory of the bloody, sodden weight of that dead soldier in his arms last night.
One safe night. One night without a death, and maybe I can beat this thing. With half of the men guarding the other half tonight, I ought to be able to turn this around and start gaining ground tomorrow.
One night. Just one deathless night.
Sunday, 27 April
The morning came as Sunday mornings should—bright and sunny. Woermann had fallen asleep in his chair; he found himself awake at first light, stiff and sore. It took a moment before he realized that his night's sleep had gone uninterrupted by screams or gunshots. He pulled on his boots and hurried to the courtyard to assure himself that there were as many men alive this morning as there had been last night. A quick check with one of the sentries confirmed it: No deaths had been reported.
Woermann felt ten years younger. He had done it! There was a way to foil this killer after all! But the ten years began to creep back on him as he saw the worried face of a private who was hurrying across the courtyard toward him.
"Sir!" the man said as he approached. "There's something wrong with Franz—I mean Private Ghent. He's not awake."
Woermann's limbs suddenly felt very weak and heavy, as if all their strength had suddenly been siphoned away. "Did you check him?"
"No, sir. I—I'm—"