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 pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease! 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.
What a scream. It ripped through the space, stabbing Danny’s eardrums. Ann flinched so hard she woke up the baby, who started wailing, too. But the bigger kid drowned the baby out. He was shrieking from his perch on Howard’s shoulders, his head pushed up against the bars. Maybe being that high up was what let him see it first.
And now the whole group saw what he was seeing: skeletons, lots of them—on the floor, piled against the walls, some with bits of stuff around them that might have been clothing. They lay in the positions they’d died in, arms stretched out, yellow skulls angled up toward the bars as if they were still hoping someone would show up and let them out. Their eye sockets were huge, like flies’ eyes, and their grimacing jaws were jammed with teeth. Danny knew what a skeleton looked like, but that was no preparation. His mind went numb, not believing it. It had to be fake. He wanted it to be fake. The whispering in his ears reached a kind of crescendo—he could hear it even through the screams of the two kids.
Ann pushed her way along the bars to Howard. In a flat voice she said: I’ve got to get Benjy out.
Howard seemed too stunned to speak. He’d taken Benjy off his shoulders, and the kid lunged for his mother’s legs and clung to them, sobbing. Panic flickered through the group like electricity, but something kept it in check—peer pressure, maybe.
Howard looked down into the pit and swallowed. Yeah. Go. You know where? Tell Mick to go with you.
Ann: No, no. We’re fine, Mick can stay. She didn’t want to be alone with him.
Danny: I’ll go. He was frantic to get out.
Howard: You know where?
Mick had come over quietly. Danny turned to him. It’s just a straight shot back down that hall, right?
Mick: Yeah. He was looking at Danny hard, trying to get something across.
Danny: I should take a flashlight. Ann, too.
A couple of graduate students handed theirs over. Mick held the map under his arm, looking at Danny in that searching way.
Danny (softly): They’ll be fine, Mick. I promise.
Mick nodded. Ann took Benjy’s hand, and she and Danny started threading their way back through the torture machines. The kid’s head hung as he walked. He was moaning, a low whine that didn’t show any signs of letting up. The baby was still awake, looking around with big eyes like she was waiting to see a thing she recognized.
They passed out of the torture room and back into the hall. There was relief in just getting out of there, although the hall seemed a lot darker with only their two beams lighting it. They were inside the earth, with no light from any direction. Danny wondered why there was even air in these tunnels—were there vents of some kind? Or did you have to go deeper before the oxygen ran out?
Danny: We’ll be out of here fast.
Ann: We should never have come in.
Danny: Nope.
Ann: I had a brain lapse.
Danny: You went with Howard. We all did.
Ann: My judgment is shot.
The kid kept moaning, but he moved his legs. After a while they passed a curved doorway on the left, and Danny’s beam picked out the rows of wine bottles. They were right on track.
His heart galloped when they hit the bottom of the steps. God, he was desperate to be aboveground. He felt a second of delayed amazement at the fact that Howard had let him get away so easily.
They’d barely started climbing when the kid’s legs went liquid. He flopped down on the stone and lay still.
Ann: Benjy, you have to walk. Please, honey, I can’t carry you with Sarah on my chest.
The kid just lay there. Danny had an impulse of pure rage—if there had been a cliff, he would’ve kicked Benjy over it. Instead, he leaned down and tried to lift the kid off the ground. He’d never held a kid in his life, not even a baby. He told Ann: I’ve got him. But he didn’t have him—the kid’s head and legs and arms dangled heavily. Danny couldn’t get a secure grip and thought he might drop him. Fuck! But when he finally got his arms under the skinny butt and the boy’s head on his shoulder, things improved. Benjy fastened himself onto Danny, arms tight around his neck, knees clamped at his waist.
They started up the stairs again, Danny first with the kid suctioned to his chest, then Ann with the baby. Now that the kid had stopped moaning, Danny noticed the whispering again. It came back like water filling up a hole—hershashasha…wassafrassa—almost words, but not quite. They took one turn up the stairs, then another.
Danny: We’re getting close, I think.
Ann: Let’s hope.
A second or two later, something smashed Danny’s head from above. The kid flailed in his arms and Danny dropped his flashlight. It tumbled down the stairs and Ann shouted, scared.
What happened? Is Benjy okay?
Danny stood there, bewildered. He tasted blood—he’d bitten his tongue. He thought someone had hit him over the head with something heavy, but when he reached up, he found a hard surface cutting off the stairs.
Danny: He’s fine. There’s—can you point your light?
Ann aimed her flashlight up. The horizontal door that the stairs twisted through had been shut. Danny shoved at it with both arms but it didn’t budge. It was locked.
The baroness.
He swallowed. For a minute he didn’t feel anything, and then a tidal wave of panic came up in him, a panic like he’d never felt before, even running alone in those woods. This had nothing to do with his mind or the worm—it was deeper. Skeletons stretched out in a cage. Danny had a physical need to scream, flail, something, but the kid in his arms kept him still. And for some reason, not moving seemed to hold the panic back.
Danny looked at Ann. There was absolute alto between them.
Ann: We have to go back.
She gave him his flashlight, which he hung on the fingers of one hand. Ann headed down the stairs, but Danny
hesitated. Finally she stopped too.
Danny (whispering): Wait.
They were quiet, and in the quiet Danny heard something shift. A sound on the other side of that door.
He said: Liesl?
Until that second, he’d had no idea he knew the baroness’s name. She must have told him that night.
A rustle above the door. She was there, listening. Danny’s whole body broke out in goose bumps.
Liesl. Please let us out. It sounded wobbly, desperate.
There was a stirring, a scrape of pointed heels on the iron door. I’ll do nothing of the kind. The iron muffled her voice, took away its shrillness.
Danny: We’ve got little kids down here. All kinds of other people. Just open the door.
The baroness laughed. It was a terrible sound, wet and raucous. You think I care what happens to you? To any of you?
Come on, Liesl. Open the door.
You don’t believe me. You can’t believe I won’t do what you want me to do. You’re children, you Americans, every one of you. And the world is very, very old.
Danny: You’re right, I don’t believe it. I think you’re a better person than that. Christ, what was he talking about? A better person? Danny wasn’t sure she was a person at all.
The baroness howled with laughter. She was having the time of her life. The sound of her laugh made Danny sweat.
Danny: Just tell us what you want. Anything. It’s yours: money? Howard’s rolling in it.
I have exactly what I want. I set a trap and you’ve fallen in it like the idiots you are. There’s no way out of those tunnels except through this keep. You’ll die, all of you, the children too. And as your screams grow weak and faint, I and the eighty generations who made me, the twenty-eight Liesl von Ausblinkers who lived and died before I was born, will rejoice. We’ll laugh! The Tartars couldn’t take this keep and neither can the Americans, with all their power and all their money.
She was bonkers. Sick—how had Danny not seen it?
He’d already turned and was heading back down the stairs. The kid was jerking in his arms, and Danny couldn’t let him hear any more. As he rounded a curve, he heard the baroness laugh.