The Keep (6 page)

Danny: Why did they leave?

Howard: Well, their kids died was the immediate reason. But money was a factor, I’m sure. It’s hard to conceive what it costs to run a place this size, but I’m learning fast.

Compared with the medieval antiques of next door, the stuff in these abandoned rooms was actually modern—not modern like today, but in that ballpark. Danny saw a typewriter and a sewing machine, old ones without plugs, but still. It gave him a weird impression that the long-ago past was in perfect shape, but the closer you got to today the more things collapsed into this ruined state.

The hall was practically dark, so Danny didn’t see the old phone dangling off a wall until he’d almost passed it. The earpiece was a black cone on a hook—Danny bolted over and grabbed the cone and stuck it next to his ear and listened with his eyes shut. Was that a flicker of life, some echoey spark of connection? Or was it nothing? And that little taste, that flicker that maybe wasn’t even a flicker made Danny realize he’d run out of time. He needed to be back in touch
now,
or something terrible would happen: his head would explode, a room would fill up with water, a big spinning blade would start sawing away at his spine. For maybe thirty seconds Danny was frantic—all he wanted was to get away from Howard and set up his dish.

Howard: What’s up?

Danny carefully hung up the cone. Nothing. I’m cool. And he forced himself to calm down. Eighteen years in New York had taught him that much.

There were holes in the roof at the end of the hall, which let in some sun and warmed things up. And then a room with no roof, just open sky over a pinkish lump that once upon a time had been a bed. Now it was a fern patch. The room was somewhere between indoors and out: a tree had shoved through a wall, and squirrels dive-bombed across a rotten rug. They wrestled over what looked like a lump of papier-mâché, and little wood bits went flying. One hit Danny’s boot, and he picked it up. It was faded red, the board piece from a Parcheesi game.

Danny: What a monster job, trying to get this place into shape.

Howard: Tell me. Although I’ll probably leave some of it like this.

Danny turned. Are you serious?

Absolutely. It’s evocative. It’s…history. You know?

Danny didn’t know. So when do you start bringing in the construction crews?

Howard laughed. You sound like the kids. Or not kids, but you know, students. My
staff.
They want everything to happen now. I used to be like that, too, but I’ve become more long haul.

Danny: Meaning what?

Howard: Meaning you bide your time. Wait for the right moment. I spent years doing the most shitty, meaningless work you can imagine, money making money making money into a giant fucking tower of bullshit. I’m not saying there weren’t highs—where there’s money there are always highs—but a thug can trade bonds. I did it for one reason: to make so much dough I could walk away at thirty-five and do whatever the hell I wanted for the rest of my life.

Danny: Sounds nice.

Howard: And I did it. This (he waved his arm at the dead light fixtures dangling by their wires, the wallpaper coils on the buckled floor), this is what I filled up my head with shit for all those years. And I’m not going to get rushed through it by a bunch of kids.

Danny: This hotel.

Yes.

Danny: But it’s more than a hotel.

Howard smiled. I’m glad you picked up on that.

Birds were squabbling in the trees over their heads, knocking twigs and leaves onto the ferny pink lump where someone used to lie down and pull up the covers and shut his eyes.

Howard: Anyway, let’s get outside. I want to show you the garden.

Danny was only too happy to get out. He followed Howard back through the dark hall and down a curved staircase like the one he’d been stuck inside last night, except this one had no light and reeked of sooty water. Howard had a flashlight, and they took the steps slowly. Toward the bottom there was graffiti on the walls in a language Danny didn’t recognize. Also beer cans, condoms, crud left over from fires.

Danny: Who did all this?

Howard: Local kids, partying over the years. They stripped some of the rooms down here, but I think they were scared to get in too deep. Lucky for us.

At the bottom there was finally some light. The stairs fed into a room that was under construction: scaffolding on the walls, a wood floor partially laid. A pair of old glass doors faced outside.

Howard: Here’s where the Germans were when the dough ran out. He wrenched the doors open, glass shards pinging the floor, and Danny went first, stepping into that cool green ocean of leaves he’d been looking down at all morning.

Howard: Back when this was a working castle there was a bakery out here, stables, a garrison where the knights slept. Later on they ripped out the paving and made it all a big garden: landscaping, orchards, fountains, the whole bit. A lot of that is still buried under here if you look.

Buried was right. Danny could feel sun trying to push its way down through the layers of shade but the dirt was cold and black, marked with dregs of paths made out of something white. Broken seashells, it looked like. Danny followed Howard down one of these paths, past fossil trees and broken statues greened with slime, a bench swallowed up by gray flowers.

Howard: Coming up is the thing that just knocked me out. When I saw it I thought,
I have to buy this place.

They’d reached a sort of wall made out of cypress. It was tall and solid and once upon a time it was probably smooth, but now it looked like a giant cushion with its stuffing popping out. Danny followed Howard through an opening in the cypress that looked like it had been recently cut, and when he squeezed out the other side he felt sun on his face. He was standing in a clearing paved with blotchy marble. In the middle was a round swimming pool maybe forty feet across. Its water was black and thick with scum. At first Danny didn’t smell it, but the stink came on fast: a smell of something from deep inside the earth meeting open air, full of metal and protein and blood.

Mick was across the pool on his hands and knees, rubbing at the marble with some kind of long brush. He didn’t look up.

Howard: There used to be a tower right where that pool is. Round—see those broken stones around the edges? It had a well, so after the tower collapsed they built a pool in the ruin. Nifty, eh? Anyhow, this is where they drowned.

Danny: Who drowned? The smell was making his nose run.

The von Ausblinker twins. A boy and a girl, ten years old. No one really knows what happened. He looked Danny over. Allergies?

The smell.

I have a lousy sense of smell. Sometimes I think it’s a blessing.

They were drifting toward Mick. The guy was bare-chested, scrubbing so hard his torso ran with sweat. And what a torso. A hundred years of personal training wouldn’t have made Danny look like that, or even close. Mick squinted up at them.

Howard: That brush is working better than the liquid.

Mick: Yeah, check this out. He stood up, showing them a patch of glowing spotless white.

Howard: Whoa.

Mick: Picture the whole thing like that.

Howard: Just don’t try to do it all yourself. Get some help.

There was no hint of the conflict in the kitchen, not a trace. Danny wondered if his edgy state had made him exaggerate the thing. Or did they do that every day?

Howard: I was telling Danny about the twins.

Mick glanced at Danny—a cold, empty look that unnerved him, like whatever was wrong was his fault. What the fuck? Danny tried to catch the guy’s eye and stare him down, but Mick was back to his sanding.

Danny: You know about these twins from the Germans?

Howard: A little. But most of it—Howard took a long breath and looked away—there’s a family member still on the property. You could say I inherited her. A baroness. She lives in that tower—the keep, it’s called. It’s the oldest part of the castle.

Danny followed Howard’s eyes and there it was, the keep. Rising over the trees, almost white in the midday sun.

Danny: I’d love to go up there. He was thinking about his satellite dish.

Howard let out a thump of laughter. You catch that, Mick?

Mick nodded.

Howard: I wish I could take you up there, Danny. Unfortunately the baroness is—how should I say this?—not entirely supportive of our project.

Danny: She’s young, right? Pretty?

Mick and Howard looked at each other and started to laugh.

Howard: What made you think that?

Danny didn’t answer. Their laughing pissed him off.

Howard: She’s, uh…

Mick: Really really old.

Howard: C’mon, numbers man, cough it up.

Mick: Ninety-eight. We think.

Howard: But she doesn’t look a day over ninety. The two of them cracked up over that one. Danny looked at the keep and thought about the girl he’d seen in the window. Obviously Howard and Mick didn’t know about her, and he sure as hell wasn’t telling them.

Finally Howard pulled himself together and rubbed his wet eyes. I’m sorry, Danny. But if you could see what this broad has put us through—

Mick: And it’s not over yet.

Howard: No, it’s not. The laughter fizzled in him, and he ran his hands through his hair.

Mick: I still say we should start working on the keep. Just the outside. Why let her call the shots?

Howard: You could be right. Come to think of it.

Mick started scraping again, moving his brush on the marble.

Howard turned to Danny. So. Are you starting to get the idea?

Danny: The idea…?

About this place.

I—I guess I’m just taking it in.

Howard: Not the stuff, not the buildings, the rooms, all that, but the
feel
of it. All this…history pushing up from underneath.

He was looking hard at Danny. And what Danny felt wasn’t the pushing of history but the feeling he always had when a powerful person’s attention was on him alone—like a towel snapping near his face.

Howard: Here’s what I mean. Mick, hold off. Here. Listen.

Mick stopped scraping. Howard took hold of Danny’s shoulders. The grip of his hands was almost painful, but what amazed Danny was the heat pouring out of them. No wonder the guy wore shorts.

Howard: You hear those sounds? Insects, birds, but not even that. Something behind them, you hear it? It’s—what? A hum, almost. But not quite.

The heat from Howard’s hands had soaked through Danny’s jacket and shirt and was filling up his arms. He hadn’t realized he was cold, but it turned out he was—had been ever since they’d gone into the broken-down part of the castle. Danny listened and heard nothing, but it was a different kind of nothing than he was used to. Most quiet was like a pause, a blank spot in the usual noise, but this was thick, like you only heard in New York right after a snowstorm. Even quieter than that.

Howard: I don’t want to lose that. I want this place to be
about
that. Not just some resort. He let go of Danny’s shoulders. The veins stood out in Howard’s arms and neck. Danny knew he’d better understand this or look like he did.

Danny: You want the hotel to be about silence?

In a way, yes. No TVs—that’s a given. And more and more I’m thinking no phones.

Ever?

If I can make it work.

So it’ll be like a…retreat? Where people come and do yoga or whatever?

Not really. No.

Mick: Can I?

Howard: Yeah, go ahead.

Mick started brushing again. He liked to be constantly occupied, that was clear. A perfect number two.

Howard: Think about medieval times, Danny, like when this castle was built. People were constantly seeing ghosts, having visions—they thought Christ was sitting with them at the dinner table, they thought angels and devils were flying around. We don’t see those things anymore. Why? Was all that stuff happening before and then it stopped? Unlikely. Was everyone nuts in medieval times? Doubtful. But their
imaginations
were more active. Their inner lives were rich and weird.

(There was no pause in Howard’s talking, but I’m taking a pause here to tell you that Danny wasn’t listening. The mention of phones, or lack of phones, reminded him that he’d been out of touch too long for maybe an hour by now, and having that much time pass made it easy to imagine how more time could pass, and then more time, and Danny knew from experience that when someone dropped out of the mix it was only a matter of days before it seemed like they’d never been there. Everything shifted and moved and rearranged, no one’s place got saved. To Danny, the thought of disappearing like that was worse than dying. If you were dead, fine. But being alive but invisible, unreachable, unfindable—it would be like those nightmares he used to have where he couldn’t move, where he seemed to be dead and everyone thought he was dead but he could still feel and hear everything that went on. And right in the middle of thinking this stuff, Danny realized Howard was saying something important. He could tell by the way it rushed out of his cousin like it was breaking free. So Danny started listening.)

Howard:
Imagination!
It saved my life. I was a fat kid, adopted, I didn’t have many friends. But I made things up. I had a life in my head that had nothing to do with my life. And what about people in medieval times? They saw one shitty little town their whole lives, their kids caught a cold and dropped dead, they had three teeth left in their heads by the time they hit thirty. People had to do something to shake things up or they would’ve keeled over from misery and boredom. So Christ came to dinner. Witches and goblins were hiding in corners. People looked at the sky and saw angels. And my idea—my, my…plan, my—

Mick: Mission. He didn’t pause in his sanding.

My
mission
is to bring some of that back. Let people be tourists of their own imaginations. And please don’t say
like Disneyland,
because that’s the exact opposite of what I’m talking about.

Danny: I wasn’t going to say that.

Howard: People are bored. They’re dead! Go to a shopping mall and check out the faces. I did this for years—I’d drive out to the malls on weekends and just sit there watching people, trying to figure it out. What’s missing? What do they need? What’s the next step? And then I got it:
imagination.
We’ve lost the ability to make things up. We’ve farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us.