The Keep (21 page)

One of the graduate students was supposed to bring Danny lunch, which gave him an hour, maybe more, before anyone would notice he was gone, and another hour at least before they figured out he’d left the castle. It was more than enough time, but Danny walked as fast as he could without stumbling. The only advantage he had was that Howard didn’t know he’d seen through his act, and Danny had to hold that lead. He went to the garden and followed the inside of the wall to the broken part he’d climbed before, clawed his way over, then tracked the wall back to the front of the castle and turned down a path he figured had to lead into town. This escape energized Danny. His mind was sharp and his fear was under control. The worm had gotten inside him, no question, but Martha was safe in the keep. When Danny thought of her, he felt a glow near his heart.

The climb down was longer and steeper than he remembered. Danny did it in a kind of trance, and eventually there were cobblestones under his feet. When he looked back at the castle it was two or three miles away. He had no idea he’d walked that far.

He remembered this town as a place with no color, but as he headed toward the central square the brightness of everything hurt his eyes: red roofs, leafy trees, kids dashing around in stripes, dogs that looked like they’d just climbed out of a bubble bath. Crisp hills, blue sky. The castle was on the tallest hill, gold in the sunlight.

Danny had one goal: a ticket back to Prague on the same mountain train he’d taken to get here. And a secondary, optional goal (if he happened to see a travel agency): a plane ticket back to New York. He tried not to think about how insane he’d been to accept a one-way ticket from Howard. That alone should have tipped him off.

There were red benches around the square, and an older guy with a monkey in his arms was sitting on one. Danny sat next to him. The monkey was small, covered with soft pale fur. His pink-brown face looked somewhere between an ancient man and a newborn baby. The monkey’s owner offered Danny a hazelnut. Danny smiled and shook his head, but the guy kept smiling back at him and offering Danny the nut until he realized the guy wanted him to feed the
monkey.
Embarrassed, Danny took the nut and handed it over. The monkey took it in his long dry fingers and turned it slowly. Finally he cocked his head and started taking small bites, keeping his round dark eyes on Danny. The monkey’s face had more emotions than a human’s: curiosity, pity, exhaustion, like he’d already seen too much. Danny had to look away.

Eight or nine boys were kicking a ball through the square. They were excellent players, even the littlest ones. Danny didn’t think much about his own soccer days anymore, but once in a while he’d remember something from that time: the smell of crushed-up grass or how the sky looked when he would walk home after practice, a strip of rust above the houses, then neon blue edging into black. Coming home in the almost dark made him feel grown up—a taste of grown-up life. Looking back, that seemed like one of the best parts of being a kid.

Danny felt a kind of heaviness coming on him. He said goodbye to the monkey man and hauled himself off the bench. He followed one of the narrow streets that tilted up the hill. Every shop had something nice laid out in its window: fish, bread, wine. It all looked cleaned up and polished to a point that seemed abnormal, like today was a holiday. Danny asked a lady selling flowers where the train station was, but she smiled and shook her head. She didn’t understand. She pointed up the street to a store with a wood clock hanging outside it on a hook.
Inglee, inglee,
she said, still smiling.

Danny smiled too. Good. Perfect. Thank you.

The shop was cool and dusty and smelled like clocks. There was a faint sound of ticking, not one tick but a thousand different ticks overlapping. A guy with pale greased hair combed back over his head smiled up at Danny from a table covered with little parts of clocks. Danny smiled back. His face was starting to hurt from so much smiling.

Danny: Do you speak English?

Clock man: A little bit.

Fantastic. I’m trying to find the train station.

No train here. Next town. And he said some mouthful of a name that sounded like
Scree-chow-hump.

Danny: Whoa, wait a minute. I took a train here, to this town, a few days ago. So there’s got to be a train station here.

The man smiled: No train here. Train in Scree-chow-hump.

Danny stared at the guy. Was this a different town from the one he’d arrived in? Were there
two
towns near the castle?

Danny: Can I walk to Scree-chow-hump?

The man’s eyes moved over Danny. Walk? Is too far, I think.

Okay, Danny said. So he was in a different town. Which made sense, because nothing about this town was
like
the town where he’d waited for the bus. He’d ended up in the nice town instead of the shitty town, but the problem was that the train only stopped in the shitty one.

Danny: Bus? Can I take a bus to Scree-chow-hump? Or a bus to Prague? That would be the best.

Prague, no. Bus for Scree-chow-hump, of course. The man went to one of maybe fifty clocks stuck to the wall and moved the hands to 8:00.

Danny: Tonight?

No. The man made a rolling motion.

Tomorrow?
One bus, all day?

One bus only.

At eight in the morning.

Yes. Eight.

Not eight at night….

No.

That’s absolutely ridiculous! What the fuck is the matter with you people? His voice slammed the walls of the tiny shop, and Danny shut up. He sounded like a maniac. But the clock guy had no reaction, the smile was still on his face. In the quiet Danny heard that crazy ticking and it made him desperate, like a bomb was about to go off.

Man: The people of Scree-chow-hump, we don’t like them. And they don’t…he gestured at his own chest.

Danny: They don’t like you. The people in the towns don’t like each other?

Yes! Heh-heh! We don’t—yes!

Okay. Danny shut his eyes. All right. And what about…is there a travel agent around here? You know, travel agent?
Travel…agent!
He was getting loud again, he couldn’t help it. The clock guy kept smiling, but Danny picked up a vibration of anxiety under the smile. The guy was scared of him. Scared of Danny! What the fuck.

Suddenly the man nodded like he understood. He got up and led Danny to the door by one arm, gesturing up the street. Danny headed off in that direction, but there was nothing like a travel agency. The guy must’ve been trying to get rid of him. The street ended in a turn, and Danny lurched around it and found himself heading back toward the square. He took another street and followed it away from the square, but a few minutes later—boom—he was back again. This happened no matter where he went.

Danny saw a wooden globe hanging on a hook outside a shop, and he rushed over there thinking Bingo, a travel agent. But it was antiques. He didn’t even bother to go in, just looked through the window at a huge wooden arrow thing that must have been a longbow. And while he looked, light hit the window in a way that made his reflection jump out at him from the shiny glass: bandaged head, mismatched feet, a face that looked like someone had whacked it with a baseball bat and then raked it with a fork. It was a godawful sight, painful to look at, but Danny couldn’t take his eyes away. Who
was
this guy? He looked disturbed, like a person who shouldn’t be out in the world, a guy Danny would avoid on the street. It was only when he focused on what was behind the glass (big antique hunting knives with ivory handles) that the picture disappeared.

Some kind of afternoon siesta was starting up, and the streets were thinning out. Danny followed the road back to the square. The monkey man was gone. He sat on the empty bench and looked up at the castle, which made a black shadow over the hill below it. He felt confused, pissed off: he’d expected to be heading out of town by now, or at least waiting at the train station with a ticket in his hand. Instead he was looking up at Howard’s castle with no frigging idea what to do next. He remembered what the baroness said:
The town and the castle have served each other for hundreds of years.
As long as Danny was still in this town, he was under Howard’s thumb. And wouldn’t you know, he couldn’t seem to get out.

Something moved in Danny’s gut: the worm, eating. How powerful was that telescope in the castle’s kitchen window? Could Howard be using it right now to watch Danny struggle and come up short? The idea made his heart pitch. Danny looked around at the square lined with perfect shops, the sausages hanging in windows, the café with its blue umbrellas open, and wondered if any of it was real. Could it all be a setup made by Howard to distract him, to complicate the game of watching Danny flail around and get nowhere?

And as soon as Danny had this thought, the fakeness of the town seemed obvious to the point of stupidity: The too-bright soda bottles on a vendor’s cart. The flowers in boxes. The way everyone smiled. Danny stood up. Fear had its cold tongs on him again. But unlike last night, his brain was calm this time, it was making a plan. Because Danny was a fighter. That’s what no one (his pop especially) ever seemed to realize. He wouldn’t go down without a fight.

Danny went back up the street he’d just come down. Knowing the town was a fake made it seem alive to him for the first time. Finally, all those perfect details made some sense.

A lady was pulling down an awning over the antique shop with the globe outside it when Danny got back there.

Danny: Are you closed? I wanted to buy something.

The lady smiled and opened her door. She had buckteeth and red lipstick and shiny black hair. Danny smiled right back at her. So she did speak English, or at least she understood it. Maybe they all did. Hell, maybe they were all Americans putting on accents.

Inside the shop, Danny stepped around the crossbow he’d seen through the window and pointed at a framed map hanging high on a wall, too high to reach. Bingo: the lady went into another room, leaving Danny alone. He glided straight over to the window and swiped one of the hunting knives he’d noticed behind his horrible reflection. It was done in a second. Danny dropped the knife into the inside pocket of his jacket.

It was heavy. He felt the knife pulling at the fabric on his left shoulder and it steadied him the way hearing his own pulse could steady him sometimes. The blade hung directly over his heart.

The lady came back with a ladder and climbed to the top. Her skinny legs wobbled in her high-heeled shoes when she reached for the map. And even though Danny knew she was putting on an act, that she worked for Howard, he held the ladder for her.

The lady lifted the framed map off the wall and handed it down. It was too wide to tuck under an arm; Danny had to spread his arms just to hold it. As soon as he saw it, he recognized the keep—this was a map of Howard’s castle and the hills around it. There were two towns on the map, one of which seemed to be this one; at least the church looked the same. The other town must be Scree-chow-hump.

Danny paid for the map with a hundred cash. A plane ticket was probably out of the question now. Except it always had been—he was trapped here. He was Howard’s prisoner. It felt almost good to admit it.

When Danny left the shop, the town was quiet. He walked slowly back to the square, holding his framed map out in front of him like a shield. The only person left in the square was one of the older soccer boys, still practicing his footwork. The kid glanced at Danny, then looked away—the first person in town to look at him and not smile.

That was the thing about kids. They couldn’t fake it.

Danny shut his eyes, listening to the kid work the ball. He could actually picture the kid’s moves just from the sounds the ball made in the square. That’s what a great player Danny had been, back in the day.

When he opened his eyes, hours had passed. Danny knew from the light, the way it slanted in over the hills, orange and thick as paint. The town was even more crowded now than when he first came. The café chairs were packed with old ladies holding tiny dogs in their laps. There were girls in bright dresses, a guy selling balloons attached to sticks. Everything had that same colorful look, like a picture in a kids’ book that your mom would point to and say, See the dog? See the policeman? See the apples?

Someone was sharing Danny’s bench. He looked over, then pulled himself straight. It was Mick.

Mick (smiling): Good morning.

Danny: Jesus.

Mick: Howard asked me to come down and look for you.

It surprised Danny that Mick would admit this. Was he worried I couldn’t find my way back? It came out snide, mocking.

Mick: I think he doesn’t know what to expect. You’re turning out to be kind of a wild card, you have to admit. Then he laughed. Ah, it’s good for Howard. Keeps him on his toes.

Danny: Yeah, well. He’s keeping me on mine, too.

There was a silence. Danny wasn’t giving anything away. Mick was his enemy’s number two, which meant he was even more dangerous than Howard. Danny should know.

Mick: So, what do you think of this town?

Danny: Very nice.

I always like coming down here. Clears out my head.

Danny waited a minute, then asked: How long have you known my cousin?

Since we were fourteen. Reform school.

This made so much sense that Danny felt like he’d known it before and forgotten.

Danny: Why were you in there?

Mick glanced at him. We were bad. Why else do you go to reform school?

But you got better.

Mick grinned. Howard got better. I got older. He seemed more relaxed now, sitting next to Danny in this fake town, than he had at any other time so far. Danny wondered why.

Mick: I owe your cousin a lot, is the bottom line.

He must owe you, too.

Mick: I keep trying to even things up, but I just get in deeper.

He glanced at Danny, and it was all on the table: everything Danny had heard between Mick and Ann. For some reason, Mick wasn’t holding it against him. The opposite.