A Question of Time d-7

by Fred Saberhagen

  Edgar was saying to him now: "I've tried dynamite, but this is a ticklish place to try to blast; much better to dig out what's wanted carefully, with hand tools. That's where you come in."

  Jake nodded. The old man today was taking such a reasonable, businesslike attitude that Jake couldn't help getting the feeling, in spite of everything, that there was some chance this would turn out after all to be a decent, acceptable job. It was a crazy attitude, he realized whenever he stopped to think about it; but somehow when Tyrrell was talking so reasonably it seemed only natural.

  "What's back there?" Jake inquired, nodding toward the almost completely blocked chamber at the rear of the cave. Things were going so reasonably at the moment he thought he might receive an answer.

  Edgar looked at him. Then: "My work," said the old man shortly, putting a slight emphasis on the first word.

  "Hey," said Jake, half an hour after arriving back in the little house, about an hour after sunset. It was almost the first syllable he'd uttered since Edgar had told him he could go home for the night.

  At the moment he was standing in front of the electric refrigerator, holding the door open and looking in. A strange fact had just caught his attention, and he was wondering how he could have been so slow to notice it.

  "What?" Camilla, moving around behind Jake, was in the prosaic process of getting dinner ready.

  "Somebody went to the store, looks like."

  Only last night Jake had become aware, without really giving the matter any intelligent thought, that the stocks of supplies in the refrigerator were starting to run short. The cabinet shelves had still been deep in canned goods; there was no prospect of actual starvation, and so he hadn't really thought about where the eggs and ham and cheese were coming from. But this morning there had been fresh food, as there was now.

  Overnight, somehow, the refrigerator had been newly stocked. "Where'd all this stuff come from? There's eggs, there's beer, there's apples—"

  "Edgar brings it. He brought stuff last night. Every week or so he goes on what he calls a shopping trip up to the Rim. The real Rim, the one where there are people. Some of the stuff he steals from El Tovar, some he gets in other places."

  Thoughtfully Jake hefted a little wooden box of Kraft cheese. The familiar brand name on the box was heartening. It proved that the real world wasn't entirely out of reach. "Somehow I thought he stayed down here all the time."

  "He says he'd like to stay here all the time and work; he grumbles about having to go out. But he needs tools and other stuff. So while he's up there he gets some breathers' food."

  "Huh?"

  "That's what we are. You and me. We're breathers. Edgar isn't. You didn't notice yet? Edgar doesn't breathe."

  Jake stared. But now he was beginning to know that here in the Deep Canyon, the stranger a thing sounded, the more likely it was to be true.

  Camilla was nodding. "That's right. Watch him close, next chance you get. No breathing, unless he needs the air to talk." She lowered her voice to a whisper. "Jake, that's what vampires are like."

  "Vampires. You mean like in the movies."

  "No. Not like that." Looking at the restocked shelves, Camilla giggled strangely. "The way he stocked up this time, it looks like he really wants to keep both of us going."

  After a time Jake said: "He must need food for himself."

  "He doesn't eat like you and me. Not like breathing people."

  "Huh?"

  "Warm blood is all that Edgar really needs. Could be my blood, or yours, or a dog's. He sometimes catches him a wild animal, big or small, and drinks its blood."

  Jake couldn't answer.

  Too many things, impossible things, had forced themselves into his life, made themselves part of his vision of reality, over the last couple of days. By his own subjective reckoning, he had only been gone from the CCC camp three days now. He wondered if that was, if that could be, right. He could believe Camilla now, that time, like the big river itself, ran different here in the Deep Canyon.

  He said now: "I wonder what they're doing back at camp."

  "Ha. They might have forgotten you already. On their calendar, you might have been gone a month."

  Yesterday Camilla had talked casually about taking the shotgun, loading it with something lighter than what the bears required, and bringing in some rabbits. And there didn't appear to be much trouble catching fish. Behind the house she had also started a small kitchen garden, where Jake could identify carrots and tomatoes, among some tough western weeds that were threatening to take over. A branch line from the waterpipe that came in to the house from the creek was arranged to water the garden at the turn of a spigot.

  But the old man's foraging expeditions were much more interesting. "So, Edgar brings in all this store-bought stuff, eggs and canned goods and beer?"

  "Right. He wants us well-fed." Again she giggled. "He'll bring you some new clothes if you want. He brings me some. I ask him for cigarettes, but he says they're bad."

  "How does he get out of here, when he goes on these trips to the rim? I mean what path does he follow?"

  She shrugged. "He just goes. Vampires can do it. Maybe not all of them, but he can."

  "Come on." Softly Jake was trying to coax her out of being crazy. "How d'ya know he's a vampire?"

  "I know." Camilla raised one hand to rub her throat.

  "Come on."

  Camilla shook her head, as if she could read Jake's thoughts. "You'll know I'm crazy, lover, if I tell you all about what Edgar can do. You just watch for yourself. You're gonna see a lot of him from now on. And you better do the job he gave you in the cave, lover. You really better."

  Remembering the strength that had caught and wrenched his arm, made him helpless as a baby, Jake had to agree with that, at least.

  When Jake went back to work in the morning, he discovered that sometime during the preceding night Edgar had harvested a massive chunk of deep Vishnu schist from somewhere in the bed of the river—the rock was still wet, and there were tiny shellfish still clinging to one side. Then he had somehow brought the slab, which must have weighed five or six hundred pounds, up the side canyon to the workshop.

  All by himself? Jake could believe that now.

  On the workbench was a small note, in neat, precise handwriting, changing Jake's orders for the day, and signed 'Tyrrell.'

  Jake started to work accordingly, concentrating on the slab, breaking it up and mining it for nodules.

  Tyrrell reappeared promptly at dusk, just when Jake was getting ready to knock off work for the day. He examined Jake's crop of white nodules carefully, and declared himself reasonably satisfied.

  A few minutes later, alone in the house with Camilla, Jake said: "Jeez, the way he handles tools, the strength he has, he could have done in half an hour what took me all day. Maybe he could have done it even faster. What's he need me for? Why's he need either of us?"

  "I told you once what I really thought."

  "I remember. About him wanting our lives. But I just don't understand."

  "I don't understand it either, lover. It's just a feeling."

  An hour or two before dawn, Jake snapped awake. Some alien force or presence had shaken the bed that he was lying in. He came fully awake to realize that Edgar was in the bedroom with him and Camilla.

  There was only the faint light of the night sky, coming in through the curtains on the shadeless windows, to illuminate the room. But this was light enough for Jake to see Edgar, dressed as usual, standing at bedside, one arm around Camilla's naked body. She was already half out of bed, with Edgar's help getting an unsteady balance on her feet.

  Jake, with his right arm still aching from yesterday's combat, put one foot on the floor and started an unthinking, angry lunge at Edgar.

  Edgar effortlessly shoved him back, so that he went staggering across the little bedroom, striking his head against the far wall, sliding down to a sitting position on the floor.

  Slowly Jake rose and regained his balance. C
amilla, her arms at her sides, was now standing beside the bed. He saw with a chill feeling of horror that she appeared to be still asleep, her body swaying lightly. And Jake saw, with a minor shock, that her eyes were still closed, her face serenely untroubled.

  Edgar stood nearby, the fingertips of his right hand barely touching Camilla's upper arm. With gestures and a single whispered word, he conveyed to Camilla what he wanted her to do. After a moment's hesitation she obeyed the command, whatever it had been. Walking to the door, naked as she was, she went on out. Edgar followed her.

  "Cam! Wake up!" Jake shouted as she disappeared. But neither she nor Edgar paid him the least attention.

  Jake pulled on his trousers and rushed after the receding figures. He detoured sufficiently to grab up a bread knife from the kitchen table, and still caught the deliberately moving Edgar and Camilla at the front door of the house. He aimed the knife at Edgar. Edgar effortlessly caught Jake's arm and once more, with an almost absentminded motion, hurled him aside like a small child.

  Jake scrambled for the shotgun that stood leaning in a corner of the room. He swung the weapon around and aimed it, squarely at the old man in the doorway. Jake pulled the trigger, and the hammer fell with a dry snap.

  Jake screamed at Camilla to wake up.

  At last the old man seemed to notice him. "She'll awaken when I want her to," said Edgar quietly. He smiled, as if finding mild enjoyment in Jake's tantrum, went out calmly with the sleepwalking woman, and closed the door of the house behind them.

  Jake stood staring at the blank panels for a few moments. Then he broke the shotgun, saw that its load had been removed, and cast the useless weapon down. Opening the door, he followed Camilla and the vampire out of the house.

  With Camilla walking a step in advance of her escort, who seemed almost deferential, they were going in the direction of the workshop-cave.

  Jake continued to follow the pair, at a distance often yards or so. If either Edgar or Camilla was aware of Jake's continued presence, they had chosen to ignore him.

  The figures disappeared inside the cave, which remained dark. Jake, following cautiously, standing first just outside the entrance, and then just inside, peered into the darkness. A faint white glow that somehow impressed him as unhealthy was coming from the inner chamber.

  Dimly he saw that the huge stone blocking the inner chamber had by some means been swung or tilted back; there was room, just room, for Camilla to squeeze her naked body through the aperture. Edgar went after her, his body somehow gliding easily through the gap.

  Fascinated, frightened but unable to help himself, Jake crept closer, step by step.

  Until he was close enough to see how the two bodies, Edgar's and Camilla's, came together. Camilla moaned as the old man pressed her back into the corner of the chamber. Jake could see only heads and shoulders, but from the angle between them, they couldn't very well be in contact below the waist. But Jake saw now what Camilla had meant by the vampire's love-making. The old man's teeth, suddenly turned as sharp as a rat's fangs, were on her throat…

  Jake, sickened, watched for no more than a few seconds; then he retreated to the cave entrance, where he sat on the threshold of stone, staring into the cave at nothing, trying not to hear the occasional moans—perhaps they were of pleasure—that came from the inner room.

  An hour passed—or it might have been several hours. The eastern sky was growing steadily brighter when Camilla came stumbling out of the inner chamber. Jake raised his head to see her slow emergence, her form ghostly and somehow pitiful in the dim light. At the same time Jake could hear the huge rock grating, and knew that Edgar must be moving it back into place, so it would block the aperture as before.

  When Camilla reached Jake's side, he stood up and put a supportive arm around her.

  "Cam? Cam, are you all right?"

  She moaned again, and mumbled something. At that moment Edgar appeared briefly, standing before them in the entrance to the cave, apparently paying no attention to either Jake or Camilla. A few seconds later, the figure of the old man disappeared.

  Jake looked around, dazed, in the slowly increasing light. There was only Camilla, sobbing, with him now.

  Jake could see the little blood-beads on the whiteness of her throat.

  Leaning on each other for support, the two of them made their way slowly back to the house. Into the bedroom, where their clothes were still scattered about. Where their master, as Jake now fully realized, could enter any time he chose.

  There was no hope, no thought, of getting back to sleep, no effort at it. Half an hour after coming back to the house, sitting at the table in the main room, pretending to drink coffee, Camilla suddenly said to Jake: "I think he wants you to get me pregnant."

  Jake goggled at her. "What? Why'd he want that?"

  "I don't know, I don't know." Then she gripped Jake by the arm. "When he had me back inside that little room…"

  "Yeah?"

  "The two of us weren't alone. There was someone else in there too."

  "What?"

  "Someone—or something."

  Jake remembered the vague form he had seen with his flashlight, in the course of his earlier exploration of the cave. He could feel his scalp creep. "What's that mean?"

  "I don't know. I don't want to know. Jake, get me out of here! GET ME OUT!"

  Jake had no answer ready for that demand.

  In an hour or two, leaving Camilla, fully clothed again, lying sleepless on their bed, he shuffled back to the cave, where he got to work, once again following orders to mine nodules of the nameless white rock. There was nothing else that he could do, and the labor at least gave him some way to occupy his time.

  And for Jake the really crazy part, the part that made him think that maybe he'd gone around the bend himself, was yet to come.

  It came that evening, an hour after sunset, when he found himself once more standing with the vampire-sculptor at the workbench. It came for Jake as he stood there with old Edgar, and heard himself talking calmly about tools and rocks, weights and shapes, almost as if the horrors, sexual and otherwise, of the night before had never happened.

  Jake, watching the old man handle the rocks, seeing him shatter Vishnu schist with hard blows of his metal tools, could only marvel again at the master's strength and skill. Despite his fear and hatred, he could almost feel himself starting to develop enthusiasm for this project.

  For the second night in a row Jake's and Camilla's bedroom was invaded without warning; this time Jake slept through the intrusion as if he had been drugged. He was not aware of what was happening until Camilla was already gone. Then, hurriedly throwing on his clothes, he followed her and her abductor to the cave, which was once more dark and silent.

  The scene of the night before was re-enacted, with minor variations in detail. Once more the old man forced the young woman back into a corner of the inner chamber, where Jake could see only a small part of what was happening. Once more, more strongly than before, Jake got the impression that Camilla was at least on the way to becoming a completely willing partner in this act—whatever it might be exactly.

  And this time, peering into the inner chamber of the cave, Jake got a better look at the third presence there, as insubstantial but as real as light.

  He could see the whitish, translucent shape, whatever it was, move in such as way as to suggest that it was enveloping Camilla's body and, like the old man, nursing at her veins. While this was happening, the old man withdrew himself as far as the small size of the inner room permitted.

  Then he stepped forward again…

  Jake carried away with him the very distinct impression of having seen three forms locked in an orgiastic embrace.

  Headed back to the house again with Jake, minutes after sunrise, Camilla said: "Jake, lover, if he keeps on doing that to me…" She let the sentence trail away.

  Jake could imagine half a dozen outcomes if it went on. None of the ghastly pictures evoked in his mind were coherent, but each
seemed more horrible than all the others.

  "We can't let him keep on," he said. Then he added, as if in afterthought: "We've got to kill him."

  Those last five words just hung in the air. He had pronounced them quite easily and naturally, as he might have said that they needed more firewood.

  Almost casually, Camilla was nodding her agreement. "And even so, I don't know that he's the worst thing we've got to be afraid of."

  For a long time after they returned to the house that morning, Jake and Camilla sat in two chairs at the table, saying little, doing nothing.

  For a while, perversely and frighteningly, she was in a mood to giggle and tease Jake—as if getting free from Tyrrell's control was, after all, the last thing she had in mind.

  "Oooh, are you jealous, Jakey?" She pouted, mock-pleading in the tones of baby talk. "Don't ooo be jealous? Old Edgar's not a bit jealous of ooo!"

  At last he jumped up without answering her and ran out of the house, going to his work. When she brought him his lunch, sometime past midday, she was sober and serious again.

  Chapter 12

  The time at the Greenwich meridian, only ten minutes of longitude east of London, was two minutes past midnight. The penultimate day of the old year just beginning. The man who in Arizona had called himself Strangeways was now standing alone in the darkened parlor of a large Kentish country house, perhaps a quarter of a mile from the center of the village of Down.

  For many years no one had lived in this house. But for some forty years of the nineteenth century it had been the home of Charles Darwin, and on most days of the late twentieth century it was open as a museum. Tourists came with some regularity, a comparatively small number of them who were interested enough to make the effort to find the place. At midnight, naturally, there were no other tourists and even the caretakers had long since retired to their own homes and beds.

  For almost an hour the moderately tall figure of the sole nocturnal occupant had been standing, virtually motionless, in the great scientist's study. Shortly after the stroke of midnight he moved at last, lightly touched with his fingertips some of the shelved books, drew a deliberate breath to smell the furniture polish of the museum-like preservation in which the house lay bound. Standing close to the tall, dark case of Darwin's great old clock, he listened carefully to the heavy soft voice of the mechanism within. The silent visitor's investigatory methods, honed through centuries, were older than those of modern science, and in certain matters even more successful.