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Story Copyright 2004 by Jacob Thomson. All rights reserved. A limited license is hereby granted to post this story on Usenet, on appropriate fiction websites, or to include this story in PERSONAL emails, provided that this notice remains intact, and that a link is provided to http://jacobthomson.com. With the exception of brief quotes in reviews, no other use of this material is permitted without permission in writing from the author.

Naught but scattered rubble remains upon the ancient hill, where antique stones here and there thrust up through the bare earth. Black soil, rich and fertile appearing, yet strangely barren. Around the hill lies a vast, virgin forest, with here and there an ancient wagon track, or a peasant's small hut and garden, the blue-gray smoke rising from the chimney. The forest ends perhaps halfway up the slope of the hill, turning to a lovely green meadow, sprinkled in summer with wildflowers.

But the crest is barren. Where once an ancient castle keep rose to challenge the sky, surrounded by a tall, crenelated wall, there is now only rubble and the rich black loam that should support luxuriant greenery, but where nothing at all will grow. Grass seed had been scattered there, and the summer flower seeds, carried on the breeze, fell into the soil and there they died.

The local peasants never venture more than a few yards above the tree line, and never after dark. No one can remember when the castle still dominated the hill. There is only a story, generations old, of how a strange plague slowly wiped out the noble family who dwelt in that place, until the last had been carried down the winding stairs and laid to rest in the venerable crypt buried deep in the bedrock of the hill, and the castle was left to the elements.

More generations passed, and the wind and rain broke through the castle roof, until the floors collapsed into the lowest levels and only the crumbling wall remained. And then, just after the beginning of the 19th Century, a fire had swept through the tumbled beams and boards piled up inside the keep and the heat had finished the work of centuries and the ancient edifice collapsed in upon itself.

The outer curtain wall had long ago succumbed to the need for building stone. It was said that there was hardly a house in the district that did not have at least a few of its stones built into a foundation or wall. With the fire having tumbled the keep, those stones, as well, slowly vanished from the site, to be incorporated into some newer structure. At last, only those half buried stones that remain today were left, marking the burial site of the ancient Von Grosshelm family, whose name was memorialized only in the memories of the oldest peasants, for the great stone lintel of the burial crypt, where it was chiseled deep in the hard granite, was itself buried deep beneath the earth and rubble and out of sight of modern man.

And so it remained until the 1950s, when an avaricious government became aware of the stories of great wealth buried along with the corpses in the Von Grosshelm crypt. There was gold there, it was said, gold in great aubundance. Chests of old coins, and rich religious treasure in the tiny chapel at the entrance to the crypt. It seemed strange even to the supposedly benevolent men in Bucharest that no one had plundered the crypt ages ago, but the story was that a fear of the plague breaking out again kept the locals away, and men from farther away had never heard the stories.

So men were brought to the hill to excavate. Ragged men, still dressed in the tattered remains of the field gray uniforms they had been captured in back in 1945. Men brought from prison camps in Siberia, who knew they were never going to return home. They had suffered the misfortune of being captured by the Red Army, and the Soviet Union was not so forgiving as the western powers. Prisoners must be made to pay for the crimes of their government, and for the crimes they had comitted themselves, even if those crimes were no more than an administrative excuse to make slaves of a former enemy's troops.

It was doubly hard, this grueling work of excavating the ruined castle, for the prisoners knew they were only a few hundred miles from Germany--closer than they had been since the day they marched off to the east in expectation of a short campaign and an easy victory. Nor did the knowledge of the place they were digging help, for Grosshelm is a German name, meaning "great helmet," and no doubt adopted in honor of some ancient knight's oversized jousting helm. They were digging up the tomb of one of the old Teutonic overlords of this country, perhaps even the grave of a distant relative. Coming of age in the ardently nationalistic Hitlerian years, where the old Teutonic Knights were given the awe and veneration of national demi-gods, such an act seemed little short of sacrilege.

The Russian guards, who had no great love of their socialist comrades in Bucharest, fenced off the perimeter of the hill twenty meters above the tree line. The fence, made of barbed wire, served a dual purpose. It functioned both the keep the prisoners in, and to keep the Romanians out. If greed in Bucharest had prompted the excavation of Castle Grosshelm, an even greater greed in Moscow was determined to insure that any wealth found made its way back to the Kremlin, and to hell with the Romanians.

It was slow work. Moscow had provided the prisoners and the guards, but they had not provided proper equipment. The workers were given shovels, long pry bars, picks and other hand tools, but there were no cranes or steam shovels or bulldozers. Each of the massive stones had to be dug out, then pried from its place and somehow dragged or carried away by the prisoners. What a properly equipped work force could have done in a week dragged on for nearly a year before the prisoners at last unearthed the top of a rubble filled stairway leading down into the living rock.

Even then, four more weeks passed before the rubble was laboriously hauled up and the full depth of the stairway exposed. At the bottom, a broad landing connected the stair with the chapel entrance, where a massive, iron-bound door, locked tight, barred entry.

The Russian officer in charge of the working party was momentarily stymied. Before the war he had been trained as an art historian, and his first thought was that the chapel door itself was part of the vanished castle's treasure. The wooden panels were heavily carved with religious figures. In the capitalist world, he thought, the door would be worth thousands of dollars. Comrade Stalin, he decided, would not appreciate it if he simply put his men to work breaking it down.

But it was hinged on the inside, so neither could he knock the pins out of the hinges and remove the door from the frame. "I don't suppose," he said, "that any of you men was a locksmith—or a burglar?"

One of the prisoners had been a locksmith in civilian life, but the Russians had never been told that bit of information and he wasn't about to volunteer it now. There were German dead inside the vault beyond the chapel, and he would do nothing extra to help the Russian steal from them.

The prisoners were herded back to the surface. A soldier was sent to the village for a locksmith, but returned an hour later with the news that none was to be found. If the lieutenant needed a locksmith, he would have to send to Bucharest. The village was so poor that, having nothing for anyone to steal, the peasants had no real locks on their doors.

The lieutenant decided he would attempt other methods. A cold chisel and hammer were procurred and one of the prisoners was put to work cutting the rivet heads off the thick iron lockplate. The lock was two or three centuries old, at least, he reasoned, so it was probably a fairly simple warded type that could be easily defeated as long as he could get to the guts. Cutting off the rivet heads, he thought, should not cause irreparable damage.

This proved to be the case, and at last the massive door swung into the chapel. The officer entered first, shining his flashlight around the interior. The room was square, about twenty feet on each side and topped by a barrel-vaulted ceiling. The entry door was on the east side, or so the lieutenant believed—his compass wouldn't work inside the mountain, and the stair changed directions several times on the way down.

There was an elaborate altar against the northern wall, covered by a gold brocade altar cloth. A tall, gold crucifix was at the center of the altar, flanked by a pair of four-branched gold candelabra, the candles still in them. In the center of the chapel, in front of the altar, was a long, stone catafalque, where a coffin would rest during a commital service, before being taken into the burial vault.

The entrance to the vault was in the west wall, a tall, gothic-arched opening, blocked by a wrought iron gate. There was a short marble column placed directly in front of the gate, with another, even larger, gold crucifix resting on its flat top.

"Collect all of this and take it to the top," the lieutenant ordered. "I will record each piece as it is removed," he added, "just in case one of you might be thinking of stealing something."

Despite having had the poor judgment to serve in the army of a tyrant, the prisoners were all honest men. So far as they were concerned, the only thief was the Soviet government that was looting the chapel and tomb.

It was nearly dark by the time the last of the loot was removed from the chapel. The Russian officer decided that enough had been accomplished for one day. He would worry about getting through the gate, and to any treasure in the burial vault, in the morning.

Dieter Krause jerked awake to the staccato sound of a guard's Kalashnikov on full automatic. A moment later the shooting stopped, followed instantly by a terrified scream that was itself shut off as if someone had slammed a door on the source.

Around him, Krause could see the other prisoners also sitting upright on their cots, peering about in the dim light that filtered through the canvas walls and roof of their leaky tent. He motioned for them to remain silent and cautiously got to his feet. Before he was captured, Krause had been a captain of infantry, and he was now the highest ranking prisoner in the group. They all wanted to know what was going on, but it was his place to take the risk of peeking through the tent's door. The Prussian sense of duty and leadership was still there.

He wouldn't dare go into the floodlit compound. The Russians had made it quite clear that leaving the tent after lights out would be instantly punished by shooting the transgressor. He could only peek through the canvas flap and hope no one noticed.

Cautiously, he moved the flap to one side, opening a narrow slit sufficient to peer through with one eye. Just inside the main gate a guard opened fire, shooting at something moving along the barbed wire fence. Another figure appeared from the opposite direction, moving swifty up behind the guard. The figure was clearly not a prisoner, for even from his vantage point Krause could see the slim, white form covered by a flowing gown, and the long, black hair flowing down her back.

The mysterious girl was within inches of the guard before he realized anyone was behind him. Her arm slipped around his chest, lifting him off his feet, and then she slammed him to the ground. The girl knelt over him. Another figure, this time clearly male and dressed in a costume that seemed out of a Rennaisance movie, rushed in from the direction where the guard had been firing. Like the girl, he knelt over the fallen guard.

At that moment Krause's view was abruptly blocked by a face. The man standing before the tent was tall and gaunt, his narrow face framed by flowing white hair, worn in a fashion that had gone out of style centuries before. His eyes were deep set, dark as midnight. But it was his mouth that riveted Krause's attention.

The man's lips were thin, his mouth partly open, revealing a line of unusually white teeth. The lower lip with slightly distended, and there was fresh blood dripping down his long chin.

"Himmel!"

The man looked closer at the single eye peering out at him him. "Deutscher?" he said.

"Ja." Krause could hardly speak. He had gone to sleep a prisoner and somehow awakened in a horror movie.

"Why are you here?" the man asked, his German oddly accented and curiously phrased, sounding like some of the old books Krause had studied in University.

"We are war prisoners," he managed to say.

"Working for these Russians?"

"More like their slaves."

"No longer. Stay where you are, and in the morning you may leave." He smiled suddenly. "We shall also be gone, of course. This castle, what is left of it, will not be safe for us now."

Krause let the tent flap open a bit more. "Who are you?" he asked.

The man bowed slightly. Now Krause could see his body as well as his terrifying face. He was dressed in black, in the fashion of a 16th Century nobleman, complete with sword. "I am Helmut, Graf von Grosshelm," he said. "I will not enter your tent, and you would be wise not to invite me in. It has been far too long since last I dined and I would not wish to harm my countrymen."

With that, the man turned on his heel and disappeared from sight.

The noise continued for another hour. Here and there came the sound of firing, mingled with the screams of the dying guards. The Germans remained in their tent, lying on the ground and hoping that no stray shot would find them. Krause had moved away from the door and was huddled with his men.

Eventually it grew silent in the compound, but still none of the Germans moved. Krause had told them what the ominous nobleman had said. No one really believed him. If there was no firing now, it could as easily be presumed to mean that the Russians had triumphed.

Dawn came at last. Now the Germans began to hope. No one came to roust them out of their cots. No sound at all came from outside the tent. Only the soft whisper of the wind as it blew across the bare mountain top.

When they emerged the gates were wide open, and the compound was littered with the bodies of the Russian detachment. One of the braver men descended into the mountain, returning minutes later, his eyes wide with terror.

"They're all gone," he informed them. "The gate to the tomb is open, and all the coffins have been removed."

They would be, he thought. By now he knew what had happened, even if he couldn't quite bring himself to believe it. He was a modern man, not given to superstitious foolishness. Yet here it was before him. The Russian bodies all had their throats torn out, and there was no blood soaking into the ground around them.

It was the golden crucifix set on the short column directly in front of the tomb's gate, he thought. That had been the key, in a very literal sense. Someone had placed it there centuries before, knowing that the members of the ancient family entombed there were not really at rest. So long as the crucifix was in place they could not leave the tomb.

Then the Russian officer had taken it away. Krause didn't know how many vampires had been in the tomb. Enough, certainly. But the old Graf had somehow retained his sense of obligation to his own countrymen. The Russians were all dead, and the Germans were all alive.

And the vampires, after slaughtering the Russians, had taken up their coffins and moved to a safer place. If the Russians hadn't known what was in the tomb, it was certain that the locals did. Von Grosshelm and his un-dead clan would have wasted no time in relocating.

It was time, Krause decided, that his men did the same.