I was alive only because I was a doctor and knew German.
The Nazis surprised us in the forest. We gave as good as we got.
Almost.
I was the lone American.
Five Nazis limped behind me.
Ahead slowly walked their Carpathian guide.
In the mists ahead, I could barely make out an
ancient structure, a Keep of some kind.
The
guide stopped.
The captain called out, “Why do you stop?”
His voice lingering haltingly over unfamiliar German vowels,
the guide said,
“We must turn back. This place is … evil.”
Swearing under his breath, the bloodied captain limped up to
the guide and aimed his Luger at him.
“That
chapel will provide shelter from this damnable rain and a place to make a fire
to warm our bones.”
The guide said, “This
is no place of worship. It is a prison. To enter is to die.”
The captain shrugged.
“No, peasant. To deny the Reich
is to die.”
He shot the guide. I shivered.
There for a moment in the moonlight, it
seemed as if the guide’s face looked relieved.
The captain shoved me towards the Keep.
“Amerikaner, you will make a fire for us and tend our
wounds.“
His smile flashed like the strike of a snake. "Perhaps you may live out this night.“
His promise was as phony as his smile.
“We need to bury that guide. Wolves will be drawn to the body.“
He laughed, "Predators need to eat, too.“
All the branches outside were soaked.
The two privates still able to use both arms broke the rune-etched
structure that acted as a barrier to the rest of the huge Keep.
As soon as the strange wall was down, a wind moaned from the darkness.
Fear was bright in the wide eyes of each
Nazi.
The captain snapped, "Fools! Are
you children to be afraid of the night?“
The night.
It calls to the frightened child in all of us.
It seems to welcome the horrors with which we
once peopled the darkness.
There's power in the night. There's terror in the darkness.
The caveman knew.
There
were deadly things in the dark he did not understand. That caveman awakens when the sun sets.
As a physician, I knew all too well how much science didn’t
know about the body,
why things went wrong with it, and how much Man still had
to learn.
I did what I could to staunch the flow of the soldiers’
wounds.
My oath did not let me differentiate
between ally and enemy.
The captain pointed his Luger at me as he put his back to
the Keep’s cave wall and slid to the spot closet to the flickering flames.
“You will continue to feed the fire. Should it die, I will awaken.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Then, you die.”
I nodded and started to pick up the remaining pieces of the
shattered barrier.
The captain growled, “What are you doing?”
“Collecting all the pieces now so I won’t awaken you doing
it later.”
He grunted, “You grovel well, Herr Doctor.” He pronounced it däktər.
“I plan to live,” I said truthfully.
I reminded myself that a sneer was the weapon of the weak,
but his Luger put the lie to that.
He fell
asleep with the sneer still twisting those thin lips.
He slept the sleep of the exhausted.
The rain pelted the forest outside.
With prickling scalp, I saw the rain stopped
inches from the Keep’s entrance.
It could
just be a trick of the weather.
The wolves who hungrily eyed the guide’s body but refused to
approach it
(and the Keep entrance)
made me think otherwise.
I started to piece together the remains of the barrier on
the rock floor.
The two Nazis had been
so weak they left huge chunks of it intact.
I made a passable mosaic of the barrier between me and the sleeping
Nazis.
Maybe they were superstitious, but the two Nazis had not fed
any of the wood carved with runes into the fire.
I survived medical school by having a memory for
detail.
I managed to fit all the wood runes
in the order I remembered.
I no sooner finished than the wolves started whimpering behind
me.
I turned on my knees to see the
wolves slinking away, their ears down and their tails between their legs.
I turned back around and believed in Evil.
In the gloom, I spotted … something.
My voice strangled in my throat. Something was tottering from the darkness
beyond.
A strange whistling sank and rose. There was a low fire behind it.
I could not see from what source the dim glow
came. It seemed to emanate from no central focus.
But I
saw a vague figure shambling toward us.
It was made of such blackness as I had not
dreamed existed this side of the grave.
The oily blackness had the musty feel of antiquity to it.
It
looked like a woman, but no human woman ever walked with that skulking gait,
and no human woman ever had that face of horror, that leering grimace of
lunacy.
A part of me wanted to scream at the sight of
that face, at the glint of nails in the uplifted claw-like hand.
Flabby lips turned up in hunger and ecstasy,
it bent over the four enlisted men.
Their
wet screams were cut short as their writhing bodies blurred into mist …
and
were absorbed into the black Something.
The captain started awake, his eyes wild with
terror.
He emptied the Luger into the
thing that shambled for him.
It snared his wrist and kissed him as he
gagged.
It shambled towards me but paused as it glared
at my makeshift barrier.
I scrambled out of the Keep and into the
freezing rain, taking my chances with the wolves.
The captain screamed after me as the Something
dragged him back into the darkness.
“Don’t leave me!”
I called back, “Remember? Predators need to eat, too."
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