The Keep (24 page)

Howard: Think back. I’m genuinely curious. Why buy something you’d barely looked at?

It was just an impulse.

Howard left his chair and came over to Danny.
Where
did you get it?

Little antique shop near the square.

So what caught your eye? What made you even go in?

The food tumbled in Danny’s gut. He wondered if the knife was making his jacket hang funny. It took all his willpower not to touch the pocket.

Howard was behind Danny’s chair now. I’m asking you all these questions, I hope you don’t mind, Danny, but I’m starting to think you have a—people call it all different things—I want to say a nose. For picking out things other people can’t see.

Danny: Thanks. Howard was pulling on the posts of his chair. Danny wondered if his cousin was going to tip him backward.

Howard: Anyway, let’s look at it now. Everyone, come on over and look at this map Danny found. He called this out into the dark room, where some graduate students were still milling around after dinner. No one seemed especially interested.

Howard moved a few candelabra together around the map. Graduate students began to trickle over. The kid, Benjy, came too.

Benjy (to Danny): Hi.

Danny: Hi.

How’s your head?

Just fine. How’s yours?

My head is fine, of course! He laughed at Danny and waited, but Danny didn’t smile. Are you still sad?

I was never sad.

Yes you were, I saw—

Danny walked away.

Howard: Danny, come on back. Let’s look at this map.

Eventually, a group gathered at the table. Light from the candles swished over the map. Look, Howard said softly, and there was a long pause while everyone did.

Ann: Incredible.

Isn’t it? Mick, you seeing this?

Yep.

Mick was in back. Danny hadn’t made eye contact with him since they’d come back inside the castle, but it was different now. There was an understanding between them. And part of the understanding was to hide it.

Howard: That tunnel? Under the keep?

Ann: And then that connects to all these other tunnels….

It was true. When Danny looked at the map in town he’d assumed those dark squiggles were paths on top of the hills. But they were tunnels
underneath
the hills. They started out below the keep and fanned out every which way, exactly like the baroness said.

A mutter of excitement went through the graduate students.

Howard: It’s something, eh? I mean, obviously the whole thing could be a fantasy—

Danny: I don’t think so. The baroness told me there were tunnels.

Howard turned to look at Danny. So did everyone else.

Howard (to the group): Check this guy out! Danny, this is what I’m talking about! What else’ve you got up your sleeve? Don’t hold out on us!

The mockery was right out in the open: Howard knew. He had to know. Danny’s face went hot.

Danny: You’ve got it all, Howard. There’s nothing left.

There was a pause. Howard and Danny looked at each other.

Howard: The problem is, I don’t believe you anymore.

So there it was: war. Danny let himself touch the knife through his coat for the first time in front of Howard. He’d given it a careful once-over when he first got back to the castle, after he finally took a long bath and the doctor changed his bandages. A ceremonial knife, it looked like, with an ivory handle carved with scenes of guys hunting a deer. The blade was long and curved and sharp. Did Howard have a weapon? In a T-shirt and shorts, it seemed unlikely. Where would he keep it?

Benjy: When can we go in the tunnels, Daddy?

Howard: Good question. The smart answer is probably later, after we’ve gone through a lot of rigmarole. But I’d do it right now.

Ann: In the dark?

Doesn’t matter when you’re underground.

Not with the kids, obviously.

Yes with the kids, Mommy! Yes with the kids.

Benjy could come, couldn’t he?

I can come! I can definitely come.

Ann (softly): Howard, think. We have no idea what’s down there, if the tunnels are even stable. Look how old this map is!

But Howard couldn’t think. He could hardly hear, he was too high on his own excitement. He wanted to go, he wanted to go! There was something desperate in his wanting, Danny thought, like if he waited too long it might all disappear or become impossible.

Howard pointed to the map. He said softly: You see what this is, Ann. Don’t you?

Ann: I do, but I—

It’s the thing we’ve been waiting for. Do you feel that too?

Possibly, but—

With something like this I just want to jump in there. I can’t wait!

Fine. Jump. But leave the four-year-old out of it.

Benjy: Four-and-a-quarter!

Howard: We’ll go slow. Just give him a taste. And if things seem even the slightest bit unsafe, you’ll pull him right back out.

Please Mommy please Mommy pleasepleasepleaseplease
please
! Benjy threw himself onto the floor and lay rigid. Everyone laughed, even Mick. Danny could pick out his laugh, separate from all the others.

He felt the battle in Ann: how much she wanted to please Howard to make up for the stuff with Mick and keep this castle adventure a fun thing for everyone, but also how she knew it was a shitty, stupid idea to go in the tunnels and didn’t want to go or let her kid go. But if she stood in the way, Howard would go ahead and have the adventure without her. And she’d be the one who stayed behind.

Ann: Okay.

It was pushing midnight by the time they left the castle. Most of the graduate students carried flashlights, and those twenty-odd beams electrified the dark as the group bored through the garden. The overhang of trees turned into a ceiling, and things Danny hadn’t seen before started jumping out of the gloom underneath: stone frogs and rabbits and dwarves. A horse on wheels. A table set for two swallowed up by vines.

Howard couldn’t stand to leave anyone behind. He’d combed the halls and worked his walkie-talkie, tracking down stray graduate students. There was a manic excitement to him now that made everything before look like snoozing. This filled Danny with dread. Even the baby girl was along for the ride so that Nora, the so-called Child Care Specialist, wouldn’t have to miss out. Ann carried the baby in the pouch around her neck. She gave in easily that time—she’d crossed some kind of line, and now she seemed half giddy with the adventure. They all were, snickering and whispering like a bunch of kids on a school trip as they blazed their way toward the keep.

Except Danny. The meaning of what he was doing—going underground with his cousin—tightened around him with each step. Every ten paces or so he fought the urge to slip away from the group and make a break, climb the castle walls and
run
! But he’d tried running, he’d tried all of it. There was no getting away. And a part of Danny craved that coolness of being underground. The web of secret tunnels: in a way, he wanted it, too.

The knife thumped Danny’s chest as he walked. He knew Mick was behind him, bringing up the rear with the map under his arm, and Danny had a feeling he could count on Mick if something started to go down. Thanks to Mick, he had boots on both feet and legs the same length for the first time in twenty-four hours. This felt so good it made his knee injury fade into nothing. Danny was walking without a limp for the first time in weeks.

Near the bottom of the keep they stopped. All its windows were dark.

Howard (softly): Okay, a couple of things before we go in. One: stick together. I don’t know what we’re going to find down there, but let’s find it as a group. No solo expeditions, deal? And second, we’re not trespassing, obviously, but there’s a person in there who thinks we are. She’s probably asleep, so let’s not talk for a while unless we really have to.

Danny looked up at the keep. The baroness asleep? He didn’t buy it. It was easier to believe she was dead.

Slowly the group began climbing the outside staircase that wound around the keep, Howard first, holding Benjy’s hand, then Ann with the baby, then everyone else. Danny stayed in the middle. One by one, they rose above the trees into the starry night.

The door was wide open when Danny got there, and he heard shoes scuffing on the stairs. No one was talking. More people were coming in behind him, and Danny took his place in the downward flow. As he followed those scooped-out stairs, down, down, he felt his brain relax, give up the work of thinking for itself. All those feet made a sound like whispering, like the keep was whispering into Danny’s ears. Or the keep was a giant antenna picking up whispers from some other place.

They passed the window he’d fallen out of and continued down into the windowless part of the keep, where he’d wanted to go that other day but stopped himself. The farther Danny went, the louder the whispering got, like words in a language he couldn’t understand.

Thanowa…shisela…hortenfashing…

Himmuffer…soubitane…laningshowingwisham…

The stairs snaked through a horizontal iron door held open by an ancient hook. Danny hesitated, figuring this must be the point where they passed underground, but he was a link in a chain whose back part was moving forward behind him, pushing him through that door, so Danny kept walking. It was easy.

Down another level of curling stairs. The air changed; it got thick and cold and smelled like clay. Danny sensed something happening in front of him, a slowing down or a breaking up. Sure enough, after another couple of turns the stairs fed into a hallway, and he followed the human chain through an arch cut out of a wall. Beyond it was a room full of dust. It was fine dust, like what covers up your windshield after you drive down a dirt road. It filled Danny’s lungs like little claws. And rising out of the dust were rows of wood shelves stacked with hundreds of bottles of wine.

The group was spreading out, hacking and wheezing, holding bottles under flashlight beams. Danny went to a shelf and blew dust off a bottle. The label was written by hand in some kind of calligraphy. He picked up another one. They were rounder than wine bottles today. Some were dry inside, the corks crumbling or missing. Others still had liquid in them, colored wax holding the corks in.

Through the sniffing and sneezing Danny picked up murmurs of the graduate students:
Are these real?…can’t be real…seems totally real…don’t believe it’s real….

Howard: Hey. Hey, everyone.

He was standing on top of something so they could see him above the shelves. He held a flashlight under his chin that made gouges around his eyes and lit up his hair. He looked like a spirit rising up out of the dust. Danny’s heart lurched. He touched the knife in his pocket.

Howard: A reminder, folks. The whole mission of this hotel we’re putting together is to help people shed the real/unreal binary that’s become so meaningless now, with telecommunications yada yada. So this is our chance to walk the walk. Let’s not analyze. Let’s just have the experience and see where it takes us.

Ann stood just below Howard, holding Benjy’s hand and using her other sleeve to cover the baby’s nose and mouth from the dust. Howard caught her eye and stopped. Enough said. Let’s keep moving. And it’s okay to talk. I think we’re deep enough.

He led the way back out of the wine cellar into a narrow hall with a curved ceiling made of thin yellow bricks. The flashlight beams turned it bright, and Danny saw words in some other language carved into the stuccoed walls, even pictures: A hand. A horse. A fish. Ann and the kids had fallen behind, closer to Danny. Everyone stayed pretty quiet.

They were still in the hall when they heard a thud—felt it, too—a big vibration under their feet. Everyone stopped walking, bumping each other in the narrow space.

Benjy: Daddy, what was that? His little kid’s voice cut the quiet.

Howard: I’m not sure.

They stood, listening. There was no other sound. The whispering pushed at Danny’s ears—
shorahassa…wishaforshing…lashatishing
—so close that he could almost feel the breath that came with the sounds.

Howard: Mick, you back there?

Mick: Yep.

Howard: No stragglers?

Mick: Not a one. I’ve been counting.

Howard: Huh. Okay, let’s keep moving.

They walked down the hallway. Danny noticed himself starting to zone out, maybe from the voices in his head or how little sleep he’d had. Whatever it was, he kept having to remind himself of his war with Howard, the knife, all that, because it was slipping out of his head, fading away like the pain in his head had faded, he didn’t know when. He just noticed at a certain point that it was gone.

The front of the chain made a right. Excited rumbles and murmurs chased the whispering out of Danny’s ears. Something big was coming up.

A thick wood door stood open. The space inside was gigantic compared to the wine cellar. It swallowed up the flashlight beams, so at first Danny wasn’t sure what he was seeing: auto chassis? gym equipment? But when everyone was finally inside filling the space with light, he realized he was looking at instruments of torture. He recognized a rack, and one of those boards with metal cuffs where a person’s wrists and ankles would go. Then a man-shaped suit made of spiked metal strips. And other stuff he couldn’t ID but it made his skin hurt to look at it.

Howard: Benjy, where are you, son? An echo warped his voice. The kid clung to his mother’s hand.

Howard: Benjy, c’mon over. Look at this stuff. This is like—talk about King Arthur! No one’s going to believe this!

The kid wanted to please his dad, you could feel it. He let go of Ann’s hand and bumped his way through the crowd. Howard lifted him onto his shoulders and led the way deeper into the room. Flashlights woke up the space as they moved. A far wall came into sight with three curved openings in it, sealed off with vertical bars.

Howard: What’ve we got here?

Everyone moved toward the arches, taking Danny with them. Beams of light poured between the bars into some kind of pit. For a second the darkness just sucked them up. Then Benjy screamed.