The Keep (Adversary Cycle, #1)

by F. Paul Wilson

"Yes. A small regular army detachment stationed in the Alps north of Ploiesti has been suffering some losses – apparently due to local partisan activity – and the officer wishes to abandon his position."

Request immediate relocation. Something is murdering my men.

a room lined with stone blocks, many of them inlaid with peculiar brass-and-nickel crosses. Forty-nine crosses in this room to be exact.

Amazing what six horrible deaths could do to the conquerors of the world. It worried him. During the past week the world had constricted until nothing existed for him and his men beyond this undersized castle, this tomb of stone. They had run up against something that defied all their efforts to stop it, that killed and faded away, only to return to kill again. The

Let them come. Let them taste the fear they so dearly loved to spread. Let them learn to believe in the unbelievable.

there is an old fortification midway along the pass which should serve adequately as a sentry base.

Castlelike in design, it was not classified a castle because of its small size. So it was called a keep.

But strange the way it looked so new…

He had watched Hitler move from beer halls, to the Chancellory, to godhood. He had never liked him.

True, Hitler had united the country and had started it on the road to victory and self-respect again, something for which no loyal German could fault him. But Woermann had never trusted Hitler, an Austrian who surrounded himself with all those Bavarians – all southerners. No Prussian could trust a bunch of southerners like that. Something ugly about them. What Woermann had witnessed at Posnan had shown him just how ugly.

sixteen thousand eight hundred and seven such crosses imbedded in the walls of this keep,"

What drives trespassers out after only one night?" "Dreams, sir. Bad dreams. And always the same, from what I can gather…something about being trapped in a tiny room with no door and no windows and no lights…utter darkness…and cold…very cold…and something in the dark with you…colder than the dark…and hungry."

"The keep itself is odd, Herr Major, what with its crosses and all. I stopped trying to explain it when I was ten years old. It's just here."

There was a sound like a human voice, but so full of horror and despair, and sounding so far away,

good quoge

The horror had begun.

okpening qhote

He ran to the narrow window, stuck his head through, and looked up and down the walls. No rope, no sign of anyone making an escape. He jerked his head back into the room and looked around again. Impossible! No one had come down

One of his soldiers, fully armed and on patrol, had been slaughtered and stripped and hung up like a chicken in a butcher's window.

"Oh, I've no intention of killing them right away. But they'll make excellent hostages. Word has been spread through the village that if one more German soldier dies, all those ten locals will be shot immediately. And ten more will be shot every time another German is killed. This will continue until either the murders stop or we run out of villagers."

"Morbid! There's nothing at all morbid about that painting!" "The shadow of a corpse hanging from a noose – is that cheerful?" Woermann was on his feet, approaching the canvas. "What are you talking about?"

He found himself wide awake, his skin suddenly clammy and crawling with fear. Something was outside the door to his room. He heard nothing, saw nothing, yet he knew it was there.

"this structure isn't a keep. A keep, or donjon as it was called in these parts, was the final inner fortification of a castle, the ultimate stronghold where the lord of the castle stayed with his family and staff. This building"

Captain Woermann told the story of the two privates who had penetrated the cellar

Summary of events

it. To my knowledge, there has never been a single death in the keep before this. But then, there has never before been a foreign army living in the keep.

It has long been an enigma. It is of unique design, yet there is no record of who built it. It is maintained in perfect condition, yet no one claims ownership. There is no record of ownership anywhere – I know, for I spent years trying to learn who built it and who maintains it."

Maybe the opening quote?

De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludwig Prinn; the other, Cultes des Goules by Comte d'Erlette.

Lovecraftian weird fiction references.

The Book of Eibon! The Seven Cryptical Books of

Finding those books had shaken her. They were purported to describe foul rites and contacts with forces beyond reason and sanity. To learn that they were real, that they and their authors were more than sinister rumors, was profoundly unsettling.

"It says, 'Strangers, leave my home!'

"Your killer, gentlemen," he went on, "is either a most erudite scholar, or else has been frozen for half a millennium."

Small punctate depressions marred each fingertip, scars left by tiny areas of healed gangrene. They were the hands of a stranger – Magda could remember when his hands had been graceful, animated, with long, mobile, tapering fingers. A scholar's hands. A musician's. They had been living things. Now they were mummified caricatures of life.

hes becokming like ghe unded

"So I noticed – and in a most provocative manner at a most strategic moment. Do you manipulate everyone this way?" "My dear Captain," Cuza said, his tone serious, "no one pays much attention to a cripple. People look at the body and see that it is wrecked by an

Interesting insight. All characters. A theme or just dr. Ciza

"Who are you?" "I am the Viscount Radu Molasar. This region of Wallachia was once mine." He was saying that he was a feudal lord of his time. "A boyar?" "Yes. One of the few who stayed with Vlad – the one they called Tepes, the Impaler – until his end outside Bucharest. " Even though he had expected such an answer, Cuza was still aghast. "That was in 1476! Almost five centuries ago! Are you that old?"

Any entity that leaves a trail of corpses in order to continue its own existence is inherently evil. And when Cuza had held up the cross, Molasar had shrunk away. Cuza had no belief in the power of the cross, yet it had power over Molasar. So it must be the cross itself which had the power, not its bearer.

"If a creature such as Molasar finds the symbol of Christianity so repulsive, the logical conclusion is that Christ must have been more than a man. If that is true, then our people, our traditions, our beliefs for two thousand years, have all been misguided. The Messiah did come and we failed to recognize him!"

Christ as messiah is real

right: Why would a vampire so afraid of the cross dwell in a structure whose walls are studded with them? Can you explain that?"

"You've surrounded yourself with brass-and-nickel crosses, thousands of them, and yet you panicked at the sight of the tiny silver one I had last night." Molasar stepped to the nearest cross and laid his hand against it. "These are a ruse. See how high the crosspiece is set?

"The Glaeken were a fanatical sect that started as an arm of the Church in the Dark Ages.

It couldn't be! And yet hadn't she also said that Molasar couldn't be? There had been stories in Bucharest about the death camps, whispered tales of the atrocities, of the countless dead; tales

"No, my dear. The devil in the keep wears a black uniform with a silver Death's Head on his cap, and calls himself a Sturmbannführer. "

But these were older. Much older. They possessed a quality of eldritch antiquity that disturbed her, seeming to shift and move as she studied them. This broadsword blade was old – so old she wondered who or what had made it.

"Lord Hitler's protection will be no more effective than all the measures taken by his lackeys here in my keep. No matter how many locked doors and armed men protect him, I shall take him if I wish. And no matter how far away he is, I shall reach him when I have the strength." Cuza could barely contain his excitement. Here at last was hope – a greater hope than he had ever dreamed possible. "When will that be? When can you go to Berlin?" "I shall be ready tomorrow night. I shall be strong enough then,

"Molasar did it. He cured me. I'm free of scleroderma – completely free of it! It's as if I never had it!"

"Yes…your work." Magda seemed to be in a sort of daze. "My work was my first thought, yes. But now that I am fit again, I don't see why I should not be made chancellor.” Magda glanced up sharply. "You never wanted to be in administration before."

"There can be no coexistence with monsters'" Glenn said, "be they Nazis or Nosferatu. Excuse me."

"Not awful, Domnisoara Cuza. Alexandru and his family have long thought themselves better than the rest of us. Serves them right!" His eyes narrowed. "And it serves as a lesson to outsiders who come here thinking themselves better than the people who live here. "

Anger and evil can spread so easily. Even the mildest and kind individual without realizing. Like modern

that the real basis for the legend is a being who thirsts for nothing so simple as blood, but who feeds instead on human weakness, who thrives on madness and pain, who steadily gains strength and power from human misery, fear, and degradation."

Chaos in the courtyard. The walking corpses were everywhere, ravaging

He draws strength from human pain, misery, and madness. He can feed on the agony of those who die by his hand but gains far more from man's inhumanity to other men."

"The story starts long ago," he said, sweating and swaying, leaning on the hiltless blade. "Long before the time of the Pharaohs, before Babylonia, even before Mesopotamia. There was another civilization then, in another age."

"It doesn't need to be written! It's obvious! You continue to exist only to oppose me. Eliminate me and you eliminate your reason for being. Kill me and you kill yourself.