Chapter 10
Triptych: The First
I: Wewelsburg Castle, Province of Westphalia, Germany
Had a man not called me by my brother’s name, I cannot imagine any other reason I would have dared to venture into a place the Nazis considered to be their “center of the world.” Wewelsburg Castle was, I learned, the Nazi ceremonial cult center for their pursuits of mythology, mysticism, and the occult. By the time I went from London to France looking for my sister, the Germans had even sent a team to Tibet to search for the roots of Aryan superiority among the Tibetans, who the Nazis believed could have been descended from Atlantis. Oh, and they treated the castle as the base for this and scores of other cultish operations, referring to Wewelsburg Castle as Camelot and the “Table Round.”
“Their bagpipes are short a few blowsticks,” I said to Whitnail after we learned all this.
He just stared blankly at me.
“It means they’re fe*kin’ crazy,” I said.
“Language,” he said, then corrected himself. “Well, accent, I mean.”
We left La Horgne with no idea where to go. At first, I noted that Whitnail had indicated he could follow a cryptid’s trail—at least that’s what he had done with Spring Heeled Jack’s trail back to Erik Ackler—so I suggested we follow the path of whatever the thing was that Ackler had flown away on.
“It does not work that way,” Whitnail said, and though his tone didn’t change, I sensed the exasperation that might have come with an eyeroll from someone else. “There are no trails in the sky.”
So, for two days, we stayed in an abandoned farmhouse east of La Horgne, eating tinned goods left behind and debating where Agnes could have gone. The fact that the Germans had sent Ackler to find her was oddly reassuring—it indicated that the High Command thought she was still alive, and they were far privier to information than I was.
“It is unfortunate, then, that we do not know any Nazis we could ask for details,” Whitnail said. “But this is also quite fortunate, in my opinion.”
Yet we did, in fact, know a Nazi—we just didn’t know we knew him.
He passed right by the farmhouse on the second morning, the soldier who had been accompanying Erik Ackler. He didn’t have his rifle, so I speculated that he’d not been freed by the French people of La Horgne but had more likely escaped after we’d sent them the note telling them where to find him. He had a blanket over one shoulder that he was using as a backpack or a suitcase to carry whatever goods he had obtained before fleeing the village ruins. We watched him from behind the corner of the barn as he moved eastward.
“If we capture him again,” Whitnail said, “you will be obliged to hurt him if you want him to tell you what he knows about your sister.”
“I’ll sic Mary and Jack on him. Those two could get Napoleon to confess to being British,” I said without thinking. When I glanced over and saw Whitnail staring at me, I realized what I had said. “So, you’re saying he’ll lie.”
“Perhaps he will lead us to better information. We could follow him.”
I considered this option as the German soldier moved farther away, becoming blurred with distance. “That’s a good idea. But if he connects with any patrols soon, he’ll send them looking for us. We’ll need to stop him before that can happen.”
“You have resources.” He did not mention my mapped tarasque directly, but it was the first cryptid I thought of and was undoubtedly on his mind as well.
I forced a smile and gestured at our snipe, who sat in the barn’s shade, sniffing the white leaves of a small cluster of Christmas roses. “Arthur can handle him. It’ll be all right. Hey, no, don’t eat that—it’s poisonous.”
Arthur looked up at me and spit out the leaf he’d just begun to chew.
Whitnail said, “You cannot poison a cryptid. But it is gratifying to see that you care about her.”
I blinked. “Arthur is a ‘her’?”
“I made an assumption by naming her in haste before I knew for certain.” He looked at me as if he were trying to appear wise. “I should have thought more carefully before I acted.”
I wasn’t biting. As I headed back to the farmhouse to gather our things, I said, “Next time, turn it upside down and have a look first.”
Arthur made a spluttering sound. Whether it was amusement or indignation didn’t matter—it told me she understood my tone, if not my words, and that was significant enough for me. As a caster, I felt like I was learning something about cryptids—I just didn’t know what.
***
We followed the German soldier at a discreet distance across cold, wet, barren fields. He stayed clear of the road and even the footpaths, which in some places were icy or even snow-covered, as he guided us east deeper into the Ardennes.
“He is avoiding patrols,” Whitnail said. “They are his people. I don’t know why.”
“I’ll tell you why,” I said, grinning to myself. “It’s because he won’t want to admit how he got separated from the caster he was supposed to be guarding. A boy, a snipe, and an albino got the better of him.”
“You do not need to be insulting to make your point.” He walked a bit faster to be in front of me, Arthur cradled in one arm. “You are clearly of Blake’s bloodline.”
I apologized immediately, but we walked along in silence for some time before he softened by beginning to sing an English song from the Great War, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” encouraging me to join in. I did. When I told him it was a song for ex-pats living in London during the war, he laughed, and all was forgiven.
The sun faded early that day, blocked by thick gray clouds that threatened snow. Many of the trees had lost their leaves, leaving twisted bare branches and gnarled bark, but there were also enough dark pines and spruces to make the density of the forest look as if it hosted skeletons in hunter green shadows. The soldier was sufficiently far ahead of us that I suggested we close in a bit to ensure we didn’t lose him in the lifelessness of the route ahead.
I need not have worried. The ambush that caught him caught us as well.
At first, all there was to see was cold, hard earth with spills of early-evening frost. The sentinel trees all around us were thick enough for monsters to hide behind, and the leaves underfoot only crackled warnings when boots ran across them.
“What is that?” I whispered to Whitnail so as not to startle the strange creature on the thin footpath ahead of us. It was about a meter tall but was oblong, with disproportionately large feet and hands. It seemed to have only one eye—by nature, not like me—and was, for want of any better description, naked and lumpy. As it crossed the path, did an about-face, and crossed the path back the way it came, it left behind what I at first assumed were droppings in its wake.
“Are those potatoes?” I looked at the creature again. “Is it crapping potatoes? Is that thing a potato?”
“It’s wearing a Bavarian alpine hat,” Whitnail said. “That would make it a Kartoffel.”
I glared at him as I fumbled for my spellbook—I was sure this was a cryptid. “Ye gallus bugger.”
“Accent,” he said. “The word in English you want is ‘smart-ass.’”
I didn’t get to correct myself. The trap snapped shut on us then.
They charged us, two dozen men in mismatched uniforms and winter coats armed with a mishmash of weapons—pistols and rifles, to be sure, but pitchforks and hoes as well. They emerged from behind the trees and sprang out from under mounds of dead brush. If I’d been wiser, I’d have had my mapped tarasque ready to defend us, but it was just as well that I didn’t. These weren’t soldiers; these were locals—rebels or refugees or both.
The potato creature did its about-face and marched across the path again, oblivious.
I raised my hands before the command to do so could be given. Whitnail put his left hand up but leaned as far to his right as he could to scoop up Arthur, who surprised me by baring teeth that I didn’t even know she had.
“Halte!” someone shouted in French as someone else called out, in a Scottish accent, “Easy there, mates.”
I stared around in surprise, moving my head back and forth to account for my blind spot from my missing eye. But they all looked the same, really: dirty, tired, hungry, angry. Then one stepped forward, an older man who carried himself like a soldier, his eyes almost as pale blue as Whitnail’s but friendlier than all the others combined. He was beginning to grin almost madly behind his unshaven, dirty face. He snapped a gray book shut, and the potato creature disappeared.
“Elijah MacCamran,” he breathed as he put the book away. “Whit wey did ye manage tae get oot?”
How did you get out? he asked me.
“No. I’m Abraham,” I said, my lip beginning to quiver and my eyes watering. “Elijah is my older brother. You all right then, mate?”
He pounded me on the back and went on about spitting images and happy coincidences, all as I looked over at Whitnail and held up two fingers.
I said, “I think maybe we just found our second good caster.”
***
His name was Inis Caulfield, an Irish soldier who had been with the 51st Highland Infantry Division at St. Valery-en-Caux. He was not among the ten thousand Allied soldiers captured or killed—instead, he was among the few hundred who had escaped into the countryside. German troops later slew some of them. Others tried to make it back home to Britain. And a few, like Caulfield, stayed to organize or aid the resistance. In this case, he was the leader of this small band.
“They singled him out,” he said (in an accent that fluctuated between Scottish and Irish) of Elijah as we followed him and his men deeper into the darkness of the Ardennes. “It was almost like they were looking for him, but I’m none too quick to blame St. Valery-en-Caux on the lad. Not all of it, anyway. But when they heard the name MacCamran, the German officer put him in a Jerry Jeep and took him east toward Belgium.”
I remembered something my oldest brother, Isaac, had once said of his limited experience on the continent. “Why Belgium? All they have there is good beer and dodgy language.”
Caulfield laughed like a man who’d forgotten how. “I doubt they stopped in a pub. No, that was the straightest route back to Germany and the castle where they took him.”
Whitnail nodded at me when I raised an eyebrow at him. “Wewelsburg. The castle Ackler spoke of.”
Caulfield looked back over his shoulder at me, then up at Whitnail. “That’s right. The Nazis have some kind of command center there. Is that where you’re headed?”
Whitnail shook his head, but I cut in. “Yes.”
We had reached a well-camouflaged encampment with tree limbs pulled down to conceal it from any planes that might pass overhead and bushes uprooted from other locations and replanted to create a wall-like perimeter. Caulfield cautioned us about traps they had laid—pits, grenade wires, and even a spring-loaded limb with spikes driven into it—as he led us to makeshift shelters and an almost smokeless fire maintained by two farmers turned warriors. They looked over at us with a world weariness that made my heart hurt, but it eased quickly as I realized they had the German soldier we’d been following on his knees between them, his hands tied behind his back, his face to the fire. Caulfield crossed to him with such intent that I called out.
“Don’t,” I said.
He stopped and turned back. He was smiling that crazy smile again. “You think the castle is where Fritz here was headed?”
Whitnail said, “We will ask him.”
Caulfield began to offer advice on what “asking” could entail, provided we used sharp objects and the fire, so I drew him aside with an air of confidence. “I’ll let Whitnail handle that. Can we talk about your potato man?”
“Humpledumple,” he said. I thought it was an Irish insult or obscenity.
The cryptid was a German one, though Caulfield had come across it by chance, not by design. He actually knew very little about its origins—one of the local freedom fighters had told him a bit, naming the creature and describing it as a trickster, notably digging holes in trails and dirt roads and leaving fully mature potatoes wherever it went.
“Like Hansel leaving pebbles the first time his father dumped them in the forest and then breadcrumbs the second time,” I said. “We know how that worked out.”
Caulfield looked uncomfortable. Finally, he said, “Mate, I really don’t know much, and by ‘much,’ I mean ‘almost nothing.’ D’ye know the story of Stingy Jack? Well, it’s common enough, even if you don’t. There was once a man, Stingy Jack, who everyone disliked because he was a dirty cheat, always tricking people with bad deals. Then, when the devil come to collect his due, Stingy Jack even tricked him into letting him carry on, but that cursed Stingy Jack into wandering the earth forever, carrying around a turnip with a burning coal in it as his only way to see where he was going.”
“Faust,” I said, and when Caulfield shrugged, I gestured to him to go on.
“Well—” Caulfield’s eyes wouldn’t meet mine. “—me cousin Barney tried to have one over on me. He jumped out at me in the garden after dark, waving a turnip at me that had a face carved on it like a jack-o’-lantern. I gave him a good puck right in the jaw. I told him he’d earned that while he lie there in the dirt, and then I turned and went right back in the house. There sat Barney at the kitchen table, playing 25 with the family.”
He must have expected me to challenge him in some way, because he quickly added, “It was a right big turnip. Anyway, the next morning, I found a book in the barn, and it had a couple of these blank cards in it, and—well, I asked around a bit, and my great aunt mailed me a poem by Joyce where he talked about ‘the card, armour against losing the memory / makes it possible to bring the living recollection unto me.’ So, I just figured it out. And then I saw the humpledumple. And I photographed it.”
He swelled just a bit. “Next time I see Stingy Jack, I’m going to photograph him, too.”
“You favor the tubers, I see.” I smiled at him. “You mapped the humpledumple, not photographed. I’ll explain what that means, if you like.”
Whitnail approached. “Yes, he was going to Wewelsburg Castle. He is not expected, but he believes it’s where Ackler goes.”
“Then all roads lead to Rome,” I said, and immediately regretted the phrase enough to hold up my hand and stop Whitnail before he tried to correct the expression. “How far is it?”
Caulfield answered. “It’s more than 300 kilometers, 350 maybe. That’s a long walk, even for a soldier.”
“Is it possible,” Whitnail said, “that you could provide us transportation of some sort?”
“I could ask around for a driver. We have an old Citroën from the 1920s that we’ve used a few times.” Then he hesitated. “But even farm trucks get searched. That’d be a right risk, wouldn’t it? I’m obliged to ask, then. What could you do to help us out?”
“We lack funds,” Whitnail conceded, but I was already edging to one side so I could more clearly see our snipe Arthur on her back, snoozing while tucked into Whitnail’s winter coat. No one had noticed her, of course.
“I think,” I said, “we could help you.”
***
I left them to it—Whitnail explaining, Caulfield grinning nervously, Arthur muttering unintelligibly while kicking at twigs on the ground. I readily confess, I felt the exact same way about wasting a card to map a snipe.
I got a couple of Caulfield’s men to help me; they undressed the German soldier while I stood and waited. When he was down to his long johns, I asked if either of them could translate for me.
“Remember me?” I asked. He shook his head when the French soldier aiding me asked the question in German, but I knew he was lying. I took my spellbook out of its satchel and opened it to the card bearing the image of a big black dog with teeth like a canine shark. I held a finger up to the French soldier to reassure him, and then I called forth my barghest just before the kneeling, bound, mostly naked German soldier.
Yes, he remembered.
“This monster can track your smell even if you bathe in tomato juice,” I said. “It can climb trees. It can swim like a feckin’ crocodile—” I paused, then said to my translator, “Did you translate the dirty word? I want to be sure he understands how serious I am. Yes? All right.”
I thought for a moment before continuing. “You’re going to go home. Where is that? Where is he from? Coburg? All right. You’re going to go home to Coburg. You’re not going to report back to the castle, go looking for Ackler, or even tell anyone why you’re home. Make up a story, I don’t care. But if you break my trust, you’ll wake up in the middle of the night with these teeth in your throat.”
I gestured at the barghest, which snarled as if on cue. “And I cannot promise it will not do the same to everyone in the house where you used to live. I say ‘used to’ because you’ll be dead. No, wait. Don’t translate that part.”
In the end, I had no idea if the barghest that I’d mapped so long ago in Yorkshire could climb, swim, or even track; cryptids did not come with instruction books, and I learned much of their capabilities through trial and error or by reading about their history on the rare occasions I found books on them. But the German soldier—Josef Huber, nineteen years old, oldest of three children to Johann and Theresia Huber, all from Coburg, Bavaria—knew less than I did about it. His desperate breathing and bulging eyes told me he would obey or at least try to.
I asked Caulfield to give him a bicycle—it was 300 kilometers for the soldier to ride—and some decent clothing. More significantly, I asked Caulfield to be certain he was not harmed. I wanted him set free.
We stayed one night in the Ardennes with Inis Caulfield and his resistance fighters. Out of a wise abundance of caution, they kept the fire so low that I could not see our host in the dimness of the night, but I periodically caught a flash of his spellbook as he first called forth and then dismissed his mapped version of Arthur. Each time, he laughed happily. We talked about the humpledumple for a time, as it was becoming part of my plan to get into Wewelsburg Castle and find my brother, and we retired late.
In the morning, we climbed aboard the farm truck Caulfield had promised us—Whitnail, Arthur, a driver, and I—and we said our goodbyes. I never saw Caulfield again, and though I did some research later on, I was never able to find out if he kept his promise and let young Josef Huber go home or if Huber himself did as I asked of him and left the war behind.
We cling harder to hope when we’re not certain we have any.
***
I was not afraid to go to the castle, not even after Caulfield had brought me up to scratch on the operations launched from it. It was not precisely a stronghold or even a military base; it was more of an administrative center converted to support a wide range of fringe occult pursuits.
“Administrators with guns,” Whitnail reminded me.
“Nobody ever wants to break into a lunatic asylum,” I said. “It’s the perfect plan.”
“With guns,” Whitnail said.
We passed three different German patrols—one headed into the Ardennes and two checkpoints at the Belgian border and deeper in the occupied country—with no challenges. Our driver, a middle-aged French farmer whose German was, I gathered, impeccable, had papers when needed and a gentle foot on the accelerator that merited no special consideration. When we crossed from Belgium into Germany via a rather treacherous back road that had no border guards, we all breathed easier. This, despite being deep behind enemy lines.
“Thank you,” I said to our driver when we stopped so he could refuel from the tanks he had in the bed of the truck. When he didn’t respond, I said, “Merci. Danke.”
He ignored me as he climbed back into the cab. Whitnail leaned to whisper in my ear. “He doesn’t like us.”
“I don’t like this,” the farmer said in perfect English. “There is no good reason for this jeopardy.”
I said, “I have a brother in the castle.”
“You had a brother in the castle.” He kept his eyes on the road as we began to move again, but his fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “I had a brother, too—at Dunkirk. We are all at war against evil. There will be sacrifices.”
The landscape changed from forests to plains to valleys and back to forest much of the way, but it became more industrial after Belgium. Even once we were in Germany, the trip took many hours, most of the day. We avoided the towns and villages, venturing instead into the farmlands.
By nightfall, we had reached the outskirts of the village of Wewelsburg, south of the castle itself, at the foot of the hill. A main road climbed the hill to reach the castle entrance, but we weren’t ready for that. Not yet. Our driver took us off the road, paralleling the Alme River, until we reached a large wooded area that Caulfield had directed us to.
There, we slept in the truck. I suggested we keep watches, but Whitnail pointed out that by the time one of us could wake the others because a patrol approached, we would already be caught. It didn’t matter; I slept so poorly that I stood watch most of the night anyway.
At dawn, we unloaded the small cart Caulfield had given us and I donned the German soldier’s uniform. It was close enough of a fit that if I pinned the sleeves and pant legs up a bit, I would pass a cursory inspection. We had a flat German cap for Whitnail; Caulfield’s resistance group had nothing at all that would otherwise fit him. His own clothing and coat would have to do.
Our driver didn’t say anything as Whitnail and I discussed my plan for getting into the castle, but when I began to outline our escape route afterward, he interjected.
“The Alme is too shallow,” he said. “In some places, too narrow, even. Do not try to use it. And you won’t find anything more than a wagon or bicycles in the village, either. Go west—in about twenty-five kilometers, you’ll come to Lippstadt. The rail station there is used by the German military, but if you survive, you can get out of Germany faster.”
“I don’t suppose you could wait for us?” I asked.
He blinked at me as if I’d pulled a coin from my ear, but he chewed his lower lip as he considered. Finally, he said, “Not here. I will drive back to the dirt road we used to cross from Belgium into Germany. I’ll wait there until tomorrow morning at sunrise. Then I will go back to France. If you can get to me at the border, I will take you with me.”
“And my brother. Us, and my brother.”
He climbed back into the battered Citroën and started the engine. “If those are the conditions, I think I won’t see you again.”
He turned the truck around as we ventured deeper into the woods in search of my next cryptid, and he was gone in just a matter of minutes. And he was right: he never saw me again.
***
I could feel the humpledumple before I saw it. We’d only been in the wooded area outside the village for an hour at most when I began to sense its essence.
“It’s here,” Whitnail said.
Arthur meeped.
It passed us a few meters away, digging and snuffling, potatoes rolling in the frozen grass and wet dirt behind it as it went, blazing its own trail. It pulled weeds aside with its oversized hands, and it was wearing the same alpine hat that Caulfield’s mapped version wore. I tried to stand up slowly—we’d been sitting with our backs to a tree while we waited—but it noticed me instantly. Its one giant eye in the middle of its misshapen potato body took me in with what I took to be great suspicion, though it edged closer just the same.
It said something to me with a great number of Gs, Rs, and Bs in it. When I turned to Whitnail for translation, he shrugged his shoulders. “Even I have limits, you know.”
I cleared my throat. “Do you understand me?”
The humpledumple bobbed in as near a nod as it could manage.
“I am a caster. Do you know what that is?” When it bobbed again, I said, “My name is Abraham MacCamran. I’ve come from Scotland. I’d like to map you, if you know what that means.”
The humpledumple squinted its one eye and gestured at my face, gurgling Gs, Rs, and Bs. I reached up and touched my eyepatch. “This is what happened another time I tried to map someone without permission.”
The humpledumple grinned stupidly, howled a series of vowels, and took its hat off, holding it to the general area where its chest would be—if it weren’t a potato. It smiled formally, a terrifying sight.
“It’s posing,” I marveled, juggling my spellbook out.
“So it is. I am thinking, if you still have your card for the Thames Monster,” Whitnail said as I got ready, “you could bring it out, and we could have fish and chips for breakfast.”
Based on the number of Fs and Ks in what the humpledumple said in response to Whitnail, there was no need for translation.
***
It went on its merry way, and a few hours later, we went ours: up the main road toward Wewelsburg Castle. The sky was overcast, which I was glad for—in a way, it felt like concealment, as if the grayness could blur our disguises around the edges and make us less obvious.
“This is a stupid plan,” Whitnail said.
“I shouldn’t be talking, remember?” I said.
His response practically dripped with sarcasm.
After I’d mapped the humpledumple and it departed, I called forth my mapped copy and asked it to generate potatoes as fast as it could. I should have tempered my request with a caveat or two—it shuffled around in chaotic circles and laid a trail of potatoes three deep and two wide. I stared at it with wide-eyed fascination as it grimaced and gritted its teeth.
“I have never seen a potato sweat before,” Whitnail conceded.
I put my hand over its card, sending it away, presumably to recover, and we set to work filling the small cart Caulfield had given us with as many potatoes as would fit. I ignored Whitnail’s frequent complaint that we were “scooping potato manure.”
Next, we set about the business of applying white bandages to my throat as if I’d been wounded. We soiled them a bit with grass and dirt to give them a weathered look, and then Whitnail—who’d had some experience with stage makeup in his time with Blake the Black before I came along—bound them under my chin.
“Should we add fake blood?” I asked.
“We are not backstage, Abraham.” He indicated the woods around us. “We also lack proper lighting. You may supply your own real blood if you feel it is likely to tip your disguise over into the realm of believable. Otherwise, I think we can forego it.”
“You’re crabbit,” I said. “Cross. Grumpy.”
“It is likely our impending deaths. I am oddly distressed about that.”
I checked my German uniform one more time, ensured that Arthur was well hidden under Whitnail’s coat, and we set out for the castle, Whitnail with his head down as he pulled the cart and me walking with as much authority as I imagined a soldier on kitchen duty could muster.
The approach to the castle was across a stone bridge that stretched over a filled-in moat and led into a tall, arched stone entrance that opened up into what looked like an open-air courtyard beyond. On either side of the archway were towers that rose four or five stories tall with windows on each floor. Those windows were secured with iron bars. I swallowed nervously, and the bandages on my throat loosened. As I adjusted them, Whitnail noted that my plan was stupid, which led me to remind him that I shouldn’t be talking, not if I were injured.
“You also should not have been talking when you devised this plan,” he said.
As we neared the entrance—a gatehouse set in the curtain wall, with wooden doors reinforced with ironwork that, thankfully, stood open at the moment—two guards emerged from the shadows underneath the archway. They were dressed in greenish-gray wool uniforms with lightning bolts on the collar, and each held a machine gun loosely at his waist. They had no helmets, and both were smoking furiously and laughing to one another. One of them smiled at me and asked something in German.
I indicated Whitnail, who responded in German: He cannot speak. He was injured. He was shot in the eye and the throat. At least, that was our cover story, so I could only hope that was what he said.
The soldier’s smile stayed, but he talked through that smile, which made me uncomfortable. It was a question, and Whitnail answered for us. I stared straight at the man, wondering who had rank—him, the unsuspecting guard, or me, the fake soldier.
Okay, this might have been a stupid plan, I told myself. Whitnail can’t translate back for me. I’m not supposed to be deaf. I have no way of knowing how to react. What if I’m supposed to salute or give him an order or—
Whitnail said something more, and I distinctly heard the word “humpledumple,” and when Whitnail began to laugh, I laughed too. The guard laughed. His comrade laughed. Whitnail asked something, and both guards stepped aside, chuckling, gesturing through the courtyard to an open corridor that disappeared deeper into the castle. They grinned at me as I passed, and so I grinned back.
As we passed out of the archway and into the dark depths of Wewelsburg Castle, I finally felt I could at least whisper again. We were alone; I stopped in the hallway, letting off a shaky breath, as Whitnail steered the cart against one wall.
“Are you going to call Mary now or wait until we get to the kitchens?” he asked.
“The kitchens.” My voice sounded small and childlike in the tall arched stone corridor. The wall was cold to the touch. “What happened there? What did he say? What did you say?”
“I told him you were wounded. He said he was surprised you had not been removed from duty. I said you had been reassigned to the village and that you were now called Private Humpledumple. They thought that was funny.”
I reached up and clapped him on the shoulder. “Well done. We’ll make a spy out of you yet.”
We moved cautiously again—I marched forward as if I belonged, checking cross corridors and, seeing no one, gestured Whitnail with the cart to follow. We passed people who were dressed as civilians, one carrying a bottle of wine on a tray, another lugging a box of linens, but neither of them so much as glanced at us. I was becoming more confident, but all that disappeared when I came around a corner to find a guard emerging from the kitchens with a sizable bowl of apples. He held one in his mouth. It was very clear by the look on his face that this was pilfered fruit.
We each stood stock-still, staring at one another. Then, he spat the apple very carefully into the bowl atop the other fruit. He said something in German that sounded conciliatory, but when I didn’t answer right away, his chest swelled with indignation. He barked something at me just as Whitnail came around the corner, potato cart in tow.
The guard stared up at the albino and said something with a suspicious squint.
Whitnail spoke quickly, gesturing first to me, then back to the cart, and then I heard “humpledumple” again, but this time, no one laughed. The guard’s suspicions were clearly not allayed; he took a step toward me.
“Have at him,” I said.
Whitnail cocked his arm and threw. The hurled potato hit the guard so hard in the forehead that it lifted him off his feet and sent him flying backward into the stone-vaulted kitchen. He struck a long wooden prep table lined with heavy cookware—iron pots and copper pans—that all came clattering down as he collapsed to the floor. We hurried into the poorly lit chamber after him, steering the cart to one side and swinging the thick wooden doors shut behind us; thankfully, the kitchens were empty, or Whitnail would have had to keep pitching.
“Make sure he’s not dead, Rapid Robert,” I said. Whitnail knelt and checked the guard for signs of life.
“Well, your plan failed,” he said as he rose again.
I indicated he should stand watch over the doors and the corridor beyond. “We’re in, aren’t we?”
“Yes, we are. But you said you had no plans to harm anyone. It seems I am doing the harming, not you.”
“Then the plan is still working.” I took out my spellbook and opened it to the page with Bloody Mary’s card. “This might be the part that actually doesn’t work.”
As Mary appeared, I held up a finger to her for silence. Her upper lip curled back and her eyes rolled back in her head, but at least she didn’t scream. She hovered off the flagstones of the kitchen floor, which forced me to look up at her; her long, wild hair and tattered black dress rippled as if underwater. Her arms waved in slow motion, seemingly keeping her afloat.
“If we must rely on her,” Whitnail said, “then my confidence in your plan continues to waver.”
One of her eyes rolled back into place and glared at him.
“Mary, Mary, Mary,” I said; her other eye reappeared and looked at me. “Listen to me. I need you to find every reflective surface in this castle. Mirrors, polished floors, water, anything. Look out and tell me if you see someone who looks like me. He’ll be a prisoner, likely in a cell.”
“And shall I terrify him?” she asked.
I realized even as I asked, “What?” her motive in whispering.
“AND SHALL I TERRIFY HIM?” she shrieked.
Whitnail quickly squinted between the cracks in the kitchen door and shook his head. I turned on Bloody Mary in alarm; though she was my own mapped cryptid, my hands quivered a bit just the same.
“Stop that. No more screaming,” I said. She looked smug, but I pressed on. “No, don’t do anything to him. Just find him and then come back and tell me where he is.”
She sneered at me like a truculent child before she disappeared. I could still sense her, even if she wasn’t with me, so I knew she was on the move somewhere nearby.
“What if she cannot find him?” Whitnail asked as I confiscated the unconscious guard’s rifle and sidearm and set about looking for something to tie him with. I handed Whitnail the rifle and attached the sidearm’s holster to my own uniform. I checked the weapon’s bullets.
“Then we’ll do it the hard way, room by room.”
Whitnail sighed. “I thought we were already doing it the hard way.”
***
She found him.
In the reflection of a metal serving tray cast aside in the corner of a dark, filthy chamber, she saw Elijah curled up on a mattress on the floor. He was either asleep—or not. She hadn’t seen him move or even breathe, so she couldn’t tell me if he was alive or not.
If he wasn’t, I told Whitnail, I still intended to bring his body out. We’d come this far.
Whitnail simply lowered his chin in agreement.
Mary gave me rough directions to the cell, and I was about to thank her—which would have meant very little to her, mapped or otherwise—and send her away when she hissed, “I KNOW WHO DONE IT.”
“Did what?”
“HURT HIM SO.”
“Who? Elijah? My brother?” When she let out a long rasp and nodded, I said, “Who is it?”
She described seeing a beady-eyed man in a reflection from ceremonial glassware in an office in one of the castle’s towers. Soldiers in the room stood at stiff attention while he spoke with a pair of officers, and his uniform was crisp and newer than anyone else’s in the chamber. The deference of the officers spoke to the man’s authority. He even kept his cap and black overcoat on as if he were preparing to leave at any moment.
“HE COMMANDS THIS PLACE.” Mary clacked her teeth over and over as if longing to bite flesh. “HE’S THE ONE WHO IS TO BLAME.”
It had not been long at all since the tarasque and the German patrol slaughter, but my chest tightened with rage just the same at the thought of what I could do. Whitnail had said to me then, You have done war. What justification would he provide me now? I wondered.
As if reading my mind, he suddenly said from across the kitchen, “You are a good caster. This man is neither.”
“Mary,” I said in a hoarse whisper, “can you scare him to death?”
She laughed aloud and disappeared.
It was likely not too late to call her back, to have her abandon this plan, this assassination attempt, as I would think of it for many years to come. But I did not. I wanted someone to be hurt for what was happening to my brother, I told myself, and for whatever they were planning to do when they found my sister. I was about to explain all this to Whitnail, just to hear it spoken aloud, when Bloody Mary returned. She averted her eyes immediately.
“What happened?” I asked.
“HE HAS NOTHING TO KILL,” she said in a tone that was almost human. “HE IS NOT ALIVE INSIDE.”
The three of us were silent until finally she said, “HE scared me.”
I found her card in my spellbook, touched it, and let her leave. The stillness afterward was almost physical.
“Bring potatoes,” I finally said to Whitnail.
“But we have guns,” he reminded me.
“Yes, but potatoes, all right?”
In late May four years later, I would see a headline in a provincial newspaper that read, “Nazi Chief Kills Himself” with a picture of a somewhat mousy-looking man with little owl glasses. The article made reference to his supervision of Wewelsburg Castle, which would prompt me to bring Bloody Mary around and show her the picture. She would recognize him instantly.
“His name was Heinrich Himmler,” I would tell her.
“ITS NAME DOESN’T MATTER!” she would shriek, and that would be it. We would never speak of him again.
***
We encountered two more soldiers as we found our way into a dungeon-like area of the castle in search of Elijah. And I must say: in another time and place, Whitnail could have been a star pitcher for the New York Yankees.
The corridors and antechambers were lighted with humming electric bulbs, but they did little to supplant the steady reminders that the castle was over three hundred years old. It was decidedly cold, enough so that we could see our breath, and none of the rooms we glanced in had carpeting of any sort. It was all stone. The stairwells had no railings and, in one case, was open on one side that would have meant a nasty fall down to the next level if you lost your footing.
“We should have torches,” Whitnail said.
“Hold on, I have one,” I said, fumbling for the one I’d taken from German soldier back with Caulfield’s resistance group. I shook it to confirm it had batteries. “If you can’t see—”
“I mean torches like the ones in Frankenstein,” he said. “This is a horror film.”
I put it away again.
After the third strike Whitnail threw, I found keys on the guard’s belt, and we tested them on the only locked cell door in the dark corner of the dungeon. It made a racket, the iron door clanging as I pulled it open—and it was enough to make Elijah roll over on his mattress and shield his eyes against the dim light coming in from the hallway. I stepped into the cell and took off the German helmet I was wearing.
“Whit?” His eyes were as round as coins, white against the dirty face housing them. “I canna believe it. My brother, here?”
“Yes. I’ve come to get you out,” I said, moving to him. I could smell him from a distance, but my relief was so profound that it was a welcome odor—it wasn’t decay. It meant he was alive. “Come on. We’re going home. Right now.”
He was crying as I helped him to his feet. He was thinner than I had ever seen him, but he still had some strength in his bones. “What about Beatrice? And yer little girl? You left them for me?”
Out in the hallway, Whitnail began to make a snuffling sound, which quickly became a deep laugh, as I stared in disbelief at Elijah’s stupid, hopeful smile. “You twit. You think I’m Isaac? I should just leave you here, for crying out loud.”
He looked sincerely confused. He leaned heavily against me, ducking his head to look past me into the hallways, as I steered him out of the cell. “Abe? I can’t believe it—I can’t believe you’re here. Where’s Isaac?”
***
Getting out was far easier than getting in—this, despite Elijah’s near-incessant chatter as we maneuvered our way through the castle’s underbelly in search of a way out that didn’t take us back through the central courtyard. I tried to ignore most of it—he talked about food a lot, and he had clearly picked up enough German to communicate with his captors—but he had my complete attention when we paused to rest after we’d ascended back into the castle proper and ducked into a small library to strategize.
“Is this where the book is?” he asked of a sudden.
“No,” I said—I’d been trying to answer him, even when he spoke nonsense. He was hot to the touch, but we had no means to treat a fever. “Not here.”
“Even if they had it, I wouldn’t-a help ’em with it,” he said. “I wouldn’t even know how. That’s Mum’s thing, not mine.”
I turned around from where I was whispering with Whitnail, whom Elijah acted as if he’d not yet seen. “What book are you on about?”
“The one they say the bomber pilot brung back from Londontown.” He was eating one of our potatoes as if it were an apple, and it made me feel sad just to see it. “The one they’re tearing all over the continent looking for. Mum would know what it’s for, but I wouldn’t. That must be why they’re lookin’ for Agnes, eh? She’s like Mum. You prolly don’t remember her invisible friend when she was a wee lass. Isaac would, I’m sure.”
Whitnail asked, “What book?”
Elijah looked around as if he couldn’t see where the voice was coming from—I had realized by then that he was so far gone he was delusional—and then said to me, “The book Uncle Blake had.”
I was dumbfounded into silence. Whitnail put one hand over his eyes for a moment. And Elijah took another bite of his potato.
“They think whatever’s in it,” he said, “will win the war for them.”
***
He was still Elijah, my older brother, the one who had taught me to play chess when I was a boy and who had told me Scottish jokes (“A tied-up woman tells the robber in her house, ‘My husband will be back before long. Get a move on—take the bagpipes and go!’”). But talking with him was like walking across a room you know well in the middle of the night, only to discover all the furniture’s been moved around. I found my way, but it took some time and a few bumps and bruises. His fever didn’t help.
The Germans had separated him from the other prisoners after the surrender at St. Valery-en-Caux and brought him to Wewelsburg Castle. In telling me about his time here, Elijah was all over the map—I had to decipher the order of events as best I could while he went back and forth in his memory.
“A German pilot ejected over London during the bombing,” he said. “He made up a story about tentacles grabbing his plane out of the sky. But he said he had recovered a book that had something to do with the tentacles. And Uncle Blake.”
This pilot managed to escape London but had run afoul of some French students in Paris. He escaped from them at some point, but the book had fallen into their hands. It had moved around since then, and the Germans had agents from the castle searching for it all over the warzones.
“They say I can give them the tentacles because we’re related,” Elijah said. “So, they’re looking for it everywhere. And for Agnes. They’re looking for Agnes for the same reason, no doubt about it.”
“It doesn’t add up,” I said privately to Whitnail. “The battle at St. Valery-en-Caux was lost in June last year. That mess with Blake was in September, so the Germans couldn’t know anything about his spellbook before then. They brought Elijah here for some other reason, and then they figured out he might be able to summon Blake’s horror because they’re kin.”
Furthermore, according to what Elijah had learned, our sister had escaped the German attack in La Horgne and was now fleeing across the continent, possibly in search of the book herself but most certainly unaware that the entire German army was on her trail. I knew that one of those pursuers was quite likely Erik Ackler, and he would be closing in on her now—Elijah had heard in the last few days that she was “heading for Poenari Castle.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Another castle. Who do you suppose is living in that one—Hitler? Mussolini? Stalin?”
“Worse,” Whitnail said.
We were out of Wewelsburg Castle by then, down the road and into a thicket while we debated how to proceed. No one had pursued us—not yet, anyway. But the soldiers we’d knocked out would be rising soon, and then the alarm would be sounded. Elijah was in and out of consciousness, and when he was awake, he was far from lucid. I even wondered if he’d heard half of what he claimed to have heard or if he might not be hallucinating.
“Well, I give up then,” I said as Whitnail and I drew away from Elijah so we could speak privately. “W. C. Fields? I’m out of guesses.”
“Poenari Castle is in Wallachia, which is part of Romania in the Carpathian Mountains.” Whitnail waited for me to react, and when I didn’t, he said, “Five-hundred years ago, the castle was home to Vlad Drăculea, Vlad the Impaler.”
Before the Bòcan Pavilions, before I’d known what a cryptid was, before Mum had exposed me to a wide variety of literature, the name would have meant nothing to me. But with great knowledge comes much sorrow, as they say, and I let out a skeptical groan. “Dracula. She’s headed to what used to be Dracula’s castle?”
Whitnail shook his head, granting me a short second of relief. “No, she’s headed to what is Dracula’s castle. He lives there still.”
I pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes and rubbed the top of my head with both hands. “A vampire. He’s a vampire.”
“A cryptid,” Whitnail said.
“Well, Arthur is a cryptid, too,” I suddenly shouted, “but Stoker’s book would have been a very different story if he’d written Snipula instead.”
“Now you’re just being irrational. He would not have bothered. The story wouldn’t have been compelling.”
I looked over at Elijah, lying near the edge of the river in the shade, and I debated whether I felt more like laughing maniacally or crying hysterically. I finally settled for returning to rationality. “I’m going after Agnes. She’s either after Blake’s spellbook or she’s going to map a vampire, but no matter which, I need to get to her before the Nazis do.”
I waited, and when he didn’t say it, I said it for him. “I don’t believe Agnes is one of them. I don’t believe she’s not a good guy.”
“What will we do with your brother then?”
“I need you to take him back to the rendezvous with our French driver. He’ll still be there, and you can get Elijah back to Caulfield’s resistance group. They can help him.”
He took this idea in stride but still said, “It is over a thousand kilometers to Romania.”
I didn’t know that—I had never been good at geography, despite an interest in it—and the number was staggering. But I shook it off. “Remember the little girl we saw in Carcassonne who was using a Bavarian mish-mash cryptid to rob that baker? I think maybe she was onto something. I’ll do what’s necessary to get money for train tickets. If I keep my head about me, I can probably get there in a week or so.”
“If you do not get shot.”
“Yes.”
“Or imprisoned.”
“Yes.”
“Or—”
“So, let’s meet in London in exactly one month,” I said. “At the gates of the London Zoo, teatime.”
“5:00?”
“All right, then. 5:00.”
Whitnail frowned. “Five o’clock is teatime.”
I knelt next to Elijah, but he was unconscious still; Whitnail would have to carry him, possibly the entire way. I will not note here what I said to him; we should all have some secrets to ourselves, even when telling our life’s story. It is enough to say that I wept as I said them. I was afraid for him. For Agnes. For Whitnail. For myself. For the world.
As we prepared to split up, Whitnail offered Arthur to accompany me, but I politely declined. I had a spellbook of cryptids for company if I needed them, and I did not need to say aloud how wearisome I found snipes. It was just as well I said no. Whitnail said, “She would not want to go with you. I was only being polite.”
We hugged. I’d thought we were going our separate ways a few times before, and they had been very emotional moments, but this time, I knew we truly were, yet the moment seemed practical and fleeting. Whitnail hoisted my brother, and I helped him secure Elijah on his back with straps and fabric shreds from the German uniform I was done with.
“Remember,” Whitnail said as we shook hands, “he was Vlad the Impaler before he was Dracula, and he was both of those before he was a cryptid. He has much history. Do not underestimate him.”
“Maybe I won’t see him,” I said. “Maybe I can find Agnes without ever crossing his path.”
Whitnail nodded, almost relieved, and turned toward the west. “That would be good. Good luck. I hope she recognizes which brother you are.”
***
My brother Elijah, who was twenty-two years old when we came out of Wewelsburg Castle together, the third child and the second boy of our parents, died while being transported to southern France for medical care. For a short time, he had been awake in the presence of his friend Caulfield and my friend Whitnail, long enough to tell them, “My little brother is a feckin’ war hero.”
His passing isn’t important to this story. It’s just important to me.
