Thorn d-4

by Fred Saberhagen

  Keeping his small battery-powered lantern aimed at the girl, Gliddon set it down on the floor. The old door of the room sagged half-closed behind him, and he let it stay that way. It was cold in here, even colder than out in the big room, and Gliddon in his heavy jacket was no more than comfortable. But the girl sitting on the floor was barefoot and without a coat; still she wasn't even shivering. Or very much frightened, either; the expression on her face as she looked back at Gliddon was half dazed, half arrogant.

  She's on something, all right, Gliddon thought, staring back at her through the eyeholes in his mask. She's got to be. He could only hope that she was not too far out of it to do a little useful talking. Del's niece. Well, that was just too bad. Del might make a fuss, but Gliddon couldn't see any way to avoid wasting this girl, and the three who had come with her as well, now things had gone this far. Helping Del sell the painting his way had been an okay idea, but it wasn't necessarily the only way for Gliddon to go. He himself was no art expert; but experts could be hired when they were needed, as Gliddon himself had been hired, often enough, for his own specialty. Now he had the painting, and he had an airplane, and he knew one or two people down in Mexico who would be glad enough to welcome him there with his treasure any time he wanted to drop in. He understood he wouldn't be getting anything like full value for the painting that way, but still he ought to be able to turn a nice profit. And tonight things were looking more and more like that was the route that he was going to have to take.

  He stood there looking down at Helen for a while, and her expression didn't change. That was a bad sign. "Well, girly. You and your friends have sure got yourselves into a bunch of trouble here. I mean a real bunch. Can you understand that? Am I getting through to you at all?"

  Evidently he wasn't, for Helen still sounded almost cheerful. "My Uncle Del is going to be angry with you for this. He's going to be out looking for me. He loves me a lot, you know, just like I was his own daughter."

  "Yeah, I bet he does. And in several other ways as well. I think I see how that goes, kid. But there's one thing I definitely don't get. You see, I really thought that you were dead. Just like everybody else, I thought so. Now it turns out you're not dead, and you've been hiding out with Uncle Del, and Mommy and Stepdaddy too, I suppose; so okay. But I should have been told that you were still alive. I mean, I was in on that snatch operation from the start, all the way, and I thought for sure that you were the one who was gunned down in that upstairs hall. We sure as hell shotgunned someone."

  Gliddon paused, with a faint sigh. The sappy look on the kid's face didn't hold out much hope that he was going to learn much from her tonight. Could he believe anything she said, anyway? But it was important that he try—something was going on here that he wasn't in on. Something even deeper than the faked kidnapping and killing, and the faked loss of the painting. Something very important, no doubt about that. And he hadn't been told by the Seabrights.

  But wait. At last, as the kid considered what he had just told her, her eyes were beginning to look shocked. "That was my girlfriend Annie who was killed," she whispered. "Did you do that?"

  "You know, Helen, I think you've changed a little since that night. Stand up for a minute, let me take a look."

  Obediently the girl stood up on her bare feet. She managed the move quickly and without difficulty despite having her hands fastened behind her back.

  "I think you're a little taller now, Helen, than when I saw you last. I can recognize you, but . . . you've changed. How old are you, anyway?"

  Helen tossed back well-cared-for brown hair from her face. "When was that? When did you see me before?"

  "Look, kid, you've seen me before, right? You were pretty sure about my name."

  "That's . . . different."

  "Yeah, sure. You know when we saw each other," Gliddon assured her softly, "if you can get your brain working. It was at your dear Uncle Del's house in Phoenix. One night he had a special kind of party there, he used to have them regularly, and I suppose the old fart still does. This time he wanted you to play along, and your mommy wanted to make him happy and she said you could. Either he didn't invite your mommy that time or else she didn't want to come. But I remember I was wishing she had, because she looked like a real good piece still." Gliddon paused. He was remembering what he had done with this very kid on that very night. But that had nothing to do with anything now, and the look on her face assured him that she wasn't remembering much of anything at all.

  He went on. "Anyway, where we met doesn't matter all that much. The point is that I know you, and that I'm going to find out why you came out here tonight. How'd you know that I was here, and had a radiophone, and so on?"

  The girl brightened; she understood now what he was talking about. "Your phone has some kind of a scrambler thing on it. So if someone else listens in when you talk to Uncle Del or Mommy or Daddy, they can't understand a thing."

  "Uncle Del and Mommy and Daddy Ellison really tell you a whole bunch, don't they? I wonder why."

  "Uncle Del does. I don't see Mommy much any more. Because I sleep in the attic a lot now. And Daddy thinks I'm dead. But he doesn't really care. He's only my step-daddy anyway." Helen giggled prankishly.

  "I get it. Or maybe I don't. So I suppose you brought your friends out here tonight to show them the radiophone."

  "Pat is the only friend I brought. I don't know the others, we just ran into them by accident. And what I wanted to show Pat was the painting."

  Gliddon sighed. At this stage, he wasn't really surprised. "You can sit down again if you want to, Helen. Who told you about the painting being here? Uncle Del? Or was it your mother?"

  Accommodatingly she sat down. "Uncle Del. He's always wanting to talk to me about it."

  Well, people could get their kicks in an infinite variety of ways; Gliddon had understood that for a long time. Still there was something going on here that he knew he didn't yet understand. "Now look, Helen, what I'm going to ask you now is very important. You want to get out of all this trouble that you're in, don't you? How many other people have you talked to about there being a painting out here, and a radiophone, and all?"

  "Nobody." And now at last, delayed, the sniffles started. "Just the kids who are here."

  "Nobody else at all? You're sure? You're very sure?"

  "Yeeesss." The word trailed off into a great sour violin-note of a sob.

  Gliddon felt like slapping her, like killing her. But for the moment he wasn't rough. He was very seldom rough without calculation, and right now it wasn't called for by the situation. He found himself tending to believe the kid. If what he heard from the other three captives tended to confirm her story, then these four but only these four would have to go. Then maybe the operation of selling the painting as Delaunay planned could still go on.

  He patted Helen gently on the head. "Just take it easy, kid. We're going to get this all straightened out, but it's going to take a little time. I'm going to have to keep your hands tied up for a while yet, okay?"

  She was sobbing and didn't answer. Maybe he ought to talk to her again, Gliddon told himself, when she'd had a little time to come out of it. He picked up his lantern and went out through the sagging door, which almost fell off when he moved it. Ike, still ski-masked, was sitting at the end of the corridor like a guard in a prison, in a position to keep an eye on all the cells. Gliddon nodded to him, then turned away and went into the cell where they had put the boy he also remembered from Phoenix. Another Uncle Del special.

  This one was obviously scared shitless. He sat on the floor in the corner as Helen had been sitting, but he had twisted to hide his face in the corner of the wall. He looked around with eyes squinted almost shut when Gliddon entered with the lantern.

  Gliddon put the lantern down casually on the floor, and then took a relaxed pose, leaning with his back against the wall. "Kid, we got ourselves a real serious problem here. But I have hopes that we can straighten it out without anyone getting hurt. Does that sound to
you like the way we ought to go?"

  The boy nodded quickly. "Oh yeah. Gosh." Obviously he wanted desperately to believe what Gliddon had just said, about no one being hurt—but maybe he couldn't quite believe it. He made a little choking noise in his throat.

  "On your driver's license it says your name is Pat O'Grandison." Gliddon's mind had had a little time to work on the name by now, and it sounded right to him, like he had heard it before and it really belonged to this punk he recalled from Phoenix.

  "Yeah, that's right. We didn't mean any harm by walking around here, we just got lost. The bridge was out down there, and one of the cars was stuck. The girl said she knew where there was a phone, back this way."

  "The girl?"

  "The one I was riding with. She was just giving me a ride. I didn't want to bust in on anything up here."

  "When you say the girl, you mean Helen Seabright?"

  "Yeah. That's her. That's who she told me she was."

  "Well then say Helen Seabright. I want to be filled in on all the details, so tell me everything you can. What happens to you from here on is going to depend a lot on what you tell me." Gliddon worked a cigarette and a match out of his shirt pocket and lit up. "Here, want a drag?"

  "Sure. Thanks."

  Gliddon held the smoke, let the kid inhale deeply. "Now, you say that Helen Seabright was just giving you a ride. You mean she just picked you up along the highway?"

  The kid hesitated. Gliddon could see him wavering, and then apparently deciding to tell the truth. Yippee. "No, we started out from her place in Santa Fe. Her parents' place, I guess. Great big house. Gosh."

  "And her Uncle Del was there with you, and you were all having a sort of party before you decided to take a ride."

  "Party? No. I just came to the house looking for another girl."

  "You like girls?" The boy was silent, and Gliddon went on: "Never mind. Who was this one you say that you were looking for?"

  "Annie Chapman, her name was. Still is, I guess."

  Annie Chapman. One name Gliddon was never likely to forget. Not after that one party night in Phoenix, and what had happened afterward. Del's big secret, whatever it was, that Gliddon wasn't in on—it would have something to do with her. "All right. Then what?"

  "Then . . . I kind of conked out on a sofa for a while. When I woke up this girl, Helen, was sitting there and she started talking to me. Also there was a woman in the house, and a man, an old guy, real huge. I don't know if he was her Uncle Del that you mentioned, or her father, or who."

  "You never saw him before, huh?" He peeled off his mask. "How about me?"

  The kid was immediately struck blank and hopeless. "I don't know. I don't think so. I don't always remember things too good."

  "That's fine. Outta sight. Some things you're not supposed to remember. But when I ask you to remember something, you make a special effort, huh?"

  "Sure. Anything you say."

  "Now do you know who that big old man was?"

  "No. I don't. Really."

  "Okay. And the girl you started out looking for was Annie Chapman."

  "Yeah, but they all swore she wasn't there and they didn't know her. You know her? She looks quite a bit like Helen."

  Yeah, there had been a good resemblance. Gliddon pondered. Sisters, somehow? Nothing seemed to quite make sense. And this kid didn't seem to recall that orgy night at Phoenix at all. Gliddon himself had picked up both Pat and Annie on that night, one at a bus station, one on the road—recruiting for parties had been part of his job for Delaunay. Another part had been joining in—Del liked to have a physically able and trusted employee on hand in case things got rowdy, as they often did. That night the group had included Helen, Pat, Annie Chapman—and what's-his-name, that muscular young drifter who had followed Annie when she danced off into the museum room, and had been killed by her there. Gliddon could see it yet: the strong, naked young male swinging the silver artifact, some kind of model ship, right for Annie's head; and Annie dodging and reaching up somehow out of her crouch, grabbing her assailant by wrist and ankle, and—and just flipping him somehow, so that his long-haired head smashed on a marble base, and blood sprayed on the white carpet. Gliddon had seen a few fights in his time, but never before a stunt like that.

  And from that moment, Del had made Annie his special project; he had wanted something special from her, obviously. And Gliddon, looking back, couldn't be sure that the special something had really had anything to do with sex. Gliddon had seen very little of her from that night on . . .

  And then, on the night of the engineered kidnapping, it must have been Annie Chapman, running in panic through the upstairs hall of the same mansion, who wouldn't stop when she was yelled at and so had caught a charge of buckshot in the head. Del must have known who the dead girl was; but he had said nothing to Gliddon; and the family had identified the dead girl as Helen, and had cremated her.

  Why?

  Something to do with inheritance, with wills, with who gets what. Gliddon didn't understand all the legal angles of what happened when someone as wealthy as Del died or supposedly died. Del wanted to be thought dead, to disappear, while in fact retaining control over most of his own great riches. Gliddon could understand that; he was trying to do something like it himself. But he was more and more convinced that something else important was being planned by Del, and Gliddon hadn't been dealt in. Except, maybe, in some way, he was going to be set up to take a fall.

  Damn the whole Seabright crew, anyway. They were trying something that Gliddon wasn't going to like when he found out about it. The way things were looking, more and more, they pretty well had to be.

  The boy still sat on the floor, looking up at Gliddon, growing more and more frightened; he looked sick. "Listen," he pleaded now, "I gotta go to the toilet. Please."

  "Okay," said Gliddon. He turned away and stuck his head out of the door of the cell. Suddenly he found himself feeling and thinking like a jailor, and it was amusing. "Ike? You got a client here. Take him for a walk and bring him back. I want to talk to him some more, later."

  * * *

  Judy could hear, down at the other end of the strange little hallway, the voices murmuring, sometimes rising a little in anger or in fear. The implacable man who had made them all prisoners, whose name apparently was Gliddon as the girl called Helen had said, seemed to be making his rounds like a doctor in a busy clinic, going from one treatment room to the next.

  At least none of the patients were screaming. Yet.

  Judy, to control her own fear, concentrated as much as possible on something else—on that hurrying approach that only she could sense. He was coming, in an onrush that seemed utterly tireless. The difficulty remained, though, that Judy could not tell how far he had yet to come. With a great effort she tried to communicate her own fear and need to the one approaching, and after a while it seemed to Judy that his speed had become greater still. But no words, no plans could be exchanged, and she could not be sure. The landscape around him was still all wild and empty, she could perceive that much . . . but where were his running feet? Abruptly Judy realized that he was now wingborne.

  A bright light against her closed lids startled her. She squinted open her eyes to see Gliddon, now without his mask, looking down at her over a small lantern. His face was more ordinary than she had imagined it. In one hand he carried a casual, half-smoked cigarette.

  His voice was not unkindly. It might even fit the doctor she had imagined. "Let's see, your name is Judy Southerland, as I recall from your ID."

  "That's right." Her own voice came out pleasingly strong. "I think you'd better untie my hands."

  "Now just try to have a little patience, Judy. I didn't ask you to come here, you know. What are you people doing here, anyway?"

  "I . . . any answer I give to that is going to sound pretty silly."

  "Try the true one on me. That'll save time and trouble."

  "I—no, I don't have to tell you anything at all. Except that you'd better let me
go. Help is going to be coming for me."

  The man set down his lantern carefully on the floor. Then without changing expression he drew back his arm and hit Judy open-handed across the face. Never in her whole life before had she been struck like that. Now she understood what was meant by the old expression about seeing stars. A moment later she tasted blood. And her tongue had become an odd, paralyzed lump that in a moment was going to hurt badly. It started to hurt.

  She tried moving her jaw, and was a little surprised to find that it still worked. Then, speaking carefully around her tongue, she said: "You're going to be sorry you did that. Oh God are you ever going to be sorry."

  Perhaps her sincerity made a momentary impression on the man, for he seemed to hesitate. Then he took a puff on his cigarette, and reached out to grab Judy by the hair. She saw what was coming, and uttered a little shriek. "All right! All right, I'll tell you the truth, if that's what you want. Don't blame me if it sounds completely crazy."

  Her hair was released. "I'm listening."

  "I just talked Bill into giving me a ride. Then we ran into these other two by accident. I have no idea what they were doing out this way. But our car was already stuck down there when they came along."

  "I see. It was your idea for Bill to drive you out here."

  "Yes."

  "Why? You just like to take rides in the middle of the night? On roads like that one? If you just want a peaceful place to screw, you don't have to drive out of town this far."

  Judy was silent. A hand rested on her head, and here came the cigarette again, toward her face. She yelped.

  "Wait! I'm going to the Astoria School, you see. Up in the hills on the other side of Santa Fe."

  The approaching fire paused. "That's nice, tell me more." Judy could feel in the man's hand on her head that he was enjoying this.