The Keep (26 page)

Danny: Okay. I—uh…Nora, where are you? He was stalling.

Nora came forward with wet, jumpy eyes.

Danny: Take this kid. When Nora didn’t move, he said, Do your fucking job for once and take this kid.

Nora jumped like he’d slapped her. Fuck you.

Fuck you, too.

She lifted Benjy gently from Danny’s arms, then elbowed him away.

Danny: Mick, where are you? Mick? He was buying time, trying to make the cringing feeling he had go away. Danny was a follower, not a leader. You could even say that as a follower, Danny
was
a leader. But not on his own.

Mick came forward. He was still holding the map. Danny reached for it now, putting off by another minute or two the time when they would all find out he had no plan, no solution of any kind.

Danny: Let’s look at that map.

Mick lifted up the map and Danny pointed his flashlight at it, but the glass bounced the light right into his eyes. Mick broke the map over his knee and the glass dropped away. He was holding parchment. Danny stared at the map, his eyes not even focused. He was faking it—stealing one second, then another second, then one more second before the crying would start up again.

Mick: It looks like…

Danny: If you go down…

Mick: Or maybe that way?

In the background Howard sobbed: the saddest, most hopeless sound Danny had ever heard. He’d never cried that way, never in his life.

Danny: All right, let’s just go. We’ll figure it out.

He waited while Ann helped Howard off the ground. The guy was shivering, his wet face covered with dirt.

Danny: Mick, can you go last and make sure we don’t lose anyone?

Mick: Sure thing. He seemed glad to get away.

Danny led them out of the torture room, following his flashlight beam into the dark. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. Danny had no impulses, no hunches about what to do. He had one goal: to protect these people from the fact that he couldn’t help them, pretend to lead them so they’d believe they were going somewhere and not cry and call out his name. Danny couldn’t take any more of that. He thought it would kill him.

So he led the way through nowhere, into nothing, grateful for the quiet, the sounds of all those shoes behind him. He led them down, at an angle, deeper into the earth. Then left, then up a little, then down again. Danny moved fast—the fact that he was pretending, leading them nowhere, was waiting to jump him if he hesitated. As they all walked deeper, a kind of rhythm set in. They were moving, and after they’d been moving for a long enough time there was a feeling that they must be moving
toward
something. Danny felt it, too. Like faking it for long enough had made it true.

No one had spoken since they’d left the torture room. Even Howard was finally quiet, and the sound of just their footsteps in the tunnels brought back the whispering voices to Danny. He wondered if the voices were telling him where to go. Sometimes he caught himself muttering: Right or left, I don’t know. Down, I think. Over there looks better than straight. Nope, I don’t like this—gotta go back. The tunnels were endless, a world of tunnels under the earth. The air went from dusty to dank. Eventually there was the sound of water dripping. Danny had no idea how much time had passed.

They came to a stairway. They’d passed other stairs along the way, but those had all led down. This one went straight up, and the stairs were tiny, too small to hold even half of one of Danny’s boots. Tiny and wet—impossible to climb! But something to try, to keep the group distracted. The tunnel went on past the steps, but Danny stopped.

The sound of a voice—his own voice—was strange after so much silent walking.

Danny: Okay, look. I’m going to climb these stairs and see where they go. Don’t follow me, because if I slip and fall I’ll knock everyone down. Point your beams up so I can see the way.

He felt the jump of their hope, their panic, barely under control. But Danny was calm. Weirdly calm, like he was having a dream.

Slowly, carefully, he started to climb. There were iron rings every few feet along the sides of the stairwell, which was what made climbing possible. Danny held a flashlight in his mouth, half gagging on it, grabbed an iron ring with one hand and used the other hand to claw at the slippery steps. It was the longest flight of stairs he’d ever climbed. At one point they shifted direction, and then he was beyond the reach of all the beams. He was starting to smell earth, not the gut of it where they’d been but the part that touches air: trees, grass, all those smells of life. And those smells kicked something alive in Danny—desire, an appetite. He started scrambling like a spider, throwing back his head every few feet to point his flashlight up and see what was above him. More stairs. More stairs. And finally he saw something flat: the underside of a door. Danny’s arms and legs were shaking when he got there. He pushed the door with his hand: sealed, of course. He hunched there, the flashlight in his mouth, panting and sweating, thinking he might puke.

Danny yelled down around the flashlight: There’s a door, okay? I’m going to try to open it, and I’ll make some noise. Stand away, in case I fall.

A dim sound came back up.

There was an iron ring on each side of the door. Danny grabbed one ring in each hand and walked his feet over his head until they were braced against the underside of the door. He was upside down, scrunched to the size of a tire, his head full of blood. He tapped the door with the heel of his boot: stone, it felt like.

Then he started to kick. He kicked and pushed like a madman, like it was the one thing he was made to do on earth. He kicked until he had nothing left in him, until he was gasping, gagging, veins pounding in his temples and neck. But the door didn’t move.

He called out:
Mick!
and the flashlight slipped out of his mouth and whacked its way down the stairs. Watch out, Danny yelled. Stand back, something’s falling. He couldn’t even hear the thing land. Then he called, Mick, can you come up? He was absolutely spent. He clutched the rings and hung there, breathing hard in the total dark.

It wasn’t long before he saw a light. By the time Mick was fully in view, flashlight between his teeth, Danny had recovered a little. Mick’s shirt was off, and sweat poured down his torso and ropy arms with their scarred-up hash of old track marks.

Danny: We’ve gotta kick open this door.

Mick: Let’s do it.

They coiled side by side like Danny did before, each holding an iron ring and bracing his loose arm around the other one’s neck. They started to kick. It made a lot of noise, but that was it.

Mick: Wait, wait. We’ve got to count. One, two…
three.

They pushed and groaned.

Mick: Again. One, two…
three!

They pushed together. Again. Again. Again. Danny thought the door gave just a little. Again. No, nothing. Again. Again. And then Danny felt a jerk under his feet. The door was starting to move. It’s moving, they both muttered. Again. Again. And even after being so long upside down, veins popping, eyes running, lips hanging, sweat making his hand slip on the ring, Danny felt a jolt of strength rock through him from his head to his boots. His lucky boots.

Mick was panting almost too hard to speak: One more time. This is it,
one, two, three!
They pushed, groaning, and the door moved—it slid up just a little.
One, two, three!
Danny assaulted the thing with his boots, mashed and thrust and pounded, Mick doing the same until the door lifted away like the top coming off a grave.

They crawled through the opening and collapsed. It was a while before Danny looked up and saw stars. Trees. He knew where he was: by the pool. He could smell it. And the smell was so welcome to Danny it almost seemed sweet.

They’d lifted off one of the marble panels around the pool. A perfect square. Heavy as hell. Who knew when the thing had last moved.

When he could breathe again, Danny leaned over the hole and yelled down: Okay, we’re out. I’ll come back down. It’s gonna take awhile, but we’re done. It’s all fine.

There was a second of silence. Then a cheer came up.

Danny helped Ann get up that long flight of stairs with the baby girl on her chest. She hooked one arm around Danny’s neck so if she slipped (which she did, twice) he’d be holding her, and the baby would be safe.

He carried Benjy one-armed, climbing the stairs on two legs and a hand. As far as Danny knew, the kid slept through all of it.

He and Mick hauled Howard up between them, one of Howard’s arms around each of their necks. Near the top, Howard started coming back a little. By the end he was doing some of the climbing himself.

Each one of these climbs took at least fifteen minutes, so getting everyone out of the ground was a project of hours. By the time it was finally done and they were all outside, every last graduate student lying on the marble around the pool sucking in that fresh air, the sun was up.

That was Phase One.

Phase Two was a lot of hugging. Everyone started hugging Danny, sometimes more than one person at a time, most of them laughing or crying or else laughing
and
crying. The only thing like it Danny could remember was high school graduation. He’d almost forgotten it, but the feeling came back:
We’ve been through something huge and now the rest of our lives are about to start up but we don’t want to leave this behind, we can’t, it’s too big.

Ann hugged Danny so hard that the baby on her chest let out a cry. Danny felt how physically strong Ann was, and it gave him an idea of what Mick must feel for her—how after all that strength had pulled in around you even just once, you’d feel stripped down to nothing without it.

Nora hugged Danny lightly, then kissed his cheek. And since Nora wasn’t the kissy type, plus her lips were unbelievably soft, it was a sensual thing. Danny smelled her for the first time, and the smell surprised him: it wasn’t like cigarettes or patchouli or BO, which is what he expected from a heavily pierced girl with dreads. She smelled like—what? Danny asked himself that while Nora walked away. And then she turned back and Danny saw her smile for the first time, saw the pretty girl Nora never wanted to be again. And then he knew what she smelled like—that fresh, delicate, complicated smell: lawn.

Nora: Thanks.

Danny: She said….

Nora didn’t get it at first. Then she laughed: Actually, that sentence was adverb-free.

Danny: Just,
thanks
?

Nora: That’s it. Thanks. Or maybe, Thanks, Danny. Are you disappointed?

Danny: Not at all. You’re welcome.

They looked at each other and started to laugh.

Benjy put his arms around Danny’s legs. And this was the hug that walloped Danny, because the kid’s arms were so small, and he was short enough that Danny couldn’t even really hug him back, he just put his hands on the kid’s head and felt the warm round skull under the thick hair. Howard’s son.

The graduate students hugged Danny with shaking arms and wet cheeks, sometimes a few at once so it was a hug pileup with Danny in the middle like some kind of hero. A couple of times they almost knocked him down, everyone calling
Whoa—oh—oh—oh
while they stabilized. And Danny would’ve thought these hugs would be his favorites because they reminded him of scoring in the last seconds of a game, everyone rushing the field. But they actually made him feel shaky, guilty. Like he was getting credit for something he hadn’t done.

In Phase Three it got quiet. Ann and Nora headed back to the castle with the kids, who were hungry. They waved, then slipped out through the cypress. Everyone else stayed behind, sticking close to the pool like they were waiting. Danny felt it too, a wanting to stay near the experience and the people he’d had it with. Because the closer he was to the time when he’d thought he would die, the more impossibly sweet it felt to be out here breathing in air, feeling sun on his face, all that stuff you never really think about.

Howard sat on the ground, leaning against the Medusa head spigot where Danny had seen the moving figures back when he was wigging out. His elbows were on his knees, his head on his fists. Something had gone out of Howard. Maybe Howard had gone out of Howard.

Mick was standing near him. Danny couldn’t catch his eye.

Phase Four was when Danny realized that the power was his. Howard was done, Mick was out, which left Danny in the position he’d spent sixteen years waiting for, wishing for, scheming for, groveling for, grabbing and even (when he was really desperate) praying for. The force of getting this reward after so long overwhelmed Danny at first: the pure thrill of it. That lasted maybe thirty seconds, and then the thrill quieted down and Danny realized something he couldn’t quite put a name to. It wasn’t that he didn’t
want
Howard’s power—more that the whole power thing seemed phony, beside the point, or maybe just old, like it couldn’t help Danny see this world he was looking at.

An invisible clock had started to tick. Danny didn’t know about the clock, but he knew that some crucial minute had passed when suddenly people began to drift like someone had cut a cord that was holding them all in one place. They floated away, some back toward the castle, some into the woods, some up that broken wall Danny and Howard had climbed, and a couple (unbelievably) back down the stairs into the tunnels. And as they went their ways alone or in pairs or little clusters, white morning light poured down from the sky and began its work of wiping out what had happened underground, so that already it seemed incredible to Danny that any of these graduate students had ever panicked or called out his name, or that Howard had sobbed: a joke, a fantasy too exaggerated to be true.