A Question of Time d-7

by Fred Saberhagen

  Several times she came back from these midnight excursions dreamy-eyed and looking openly happy, and Jake knew a sudden anguished impulse to murder her.

  It troubled him also that she had now begun to sleep most of the day, in a troubled and exhausted fashion, and to be restless and wakeful during the night, as if waiting for the vampire's summons.

  The next time that Jake tried to talk to Camilla about killing Tyrrell, she put him off, saying she was too tired.

  * * *

  How much time had really passed since he had been confined in this strange world, Jake could no longer even attempt to guess. But there came a day when he again was walking out of doors, beside the creek, with Camilla, feeling relatively safe in morning sunlight.

  When he returned to full awareness of where he was and what he was doing—returned from a waking dream of something horrible—he heard himself pronouncing the words: "Then we'll get him with wood."

  Camilla, for the moment looking no different than on the day he had first met her, strolled beside him, shaded as usual by her sunglasses and hat. She said: "Can't, not while he's awake. You've seen how strong he is, how fast he can move."

  "If we could only get into that place where he sleeps," said Jake. Then he stopped suddenly, staring at the canyon wall a hundred yards away with red unseeing eyes. "Dynamite," he whispered, to himself.

  The planning went on, intermittently.

  "There's fire. You say that fire hurt him too."

  Camilla nodded slowly.

  Fire made Jake think of gasoline or diesel fuel, or kerosene. None of the first two were here in the Deep Canyon, but there was certainly kerosene, stored for the household lamps in a fifty-gallon drum that lay on its side in a homemade rack under a cottonwood some thirty yards or so behind the house. Presumably Tyrrell brought in more, somehow, from time to time.

  As for the dynamite, Jake knew that Tyrrell had some stored for use in his quarrying. And Jake had learned something of the uses of fuses and blasting caps in his CCC work building trails. Edgar kept the dynamite locked up, but Jake, looking at the little shed, didn't see any reason why it couldn't be broken open.

  "Maybe if we did it that way, we could still burn him up back there in his den. Even if the dynamite doesn't get him, or it doesn't open up the rock as neatly as we'd want it to."

  No matter how they tried, any other ways of killing this monster were harder to imagine. Camilla swore repeatedly that the shooting she had witnessed had had no effect, and Jake, after what he'd now seen of Tyrrell with his own eyes, was ready to believe her.

  Jake could think of no way to trap the evil one out in the bright sunlight. Could he possibly reflect sunlight in on him somehow when he was in his den? They'd need two or three big mirrors, which they didn't have, and then just hope it worked. That idea was too impractical even to mention to Camilla.

  Jake demanded crazily: "Are you going to tell him, the next time he bites you in the neck? Tell him that we want him dead?"

  Camilla shuddered and said she was revolted at the thought of doing that. She pleaded with Jake to take it easy on her.

  "Tomorrow morning, then," said Jake at last. "As soon as the sun is up."

  "Tomorrow morning," Camilla agreed, in a whisper.

  Jake walked alone, thinking to himself. He still trusted Camilla because he had to, even though she was no longer always the same person. He trusted her—but not entirely—because he had no choice.

  Jake sat hollow-eyed beside the canyon's stream, listening to its voices. Telling himself he was trying to listen, but he thought that really he was maybe trying not to hear. There were exhortations to murder in the voices, and even stranger commands, that he had trouble understanding, and dared not wholly acknowledge even to himself.

  Tyrrell, working that evening in the cave with Jake, informed his prisoner that, according to mundane science, only very simple fossils were known to occur naturally in the deepest life-bearing rock down here, a layer of schist whose formation lay beyond an unimaginable gulf of time. Below those simple relics, the layers of lifeless Precambrian rock stretched back an enormously greater distance toward eternity.

  "Are you capable of imagining even a million years, Rezner?" asked Tyrrell, as the two men paused in the midst of their labors on the deep rock.

  "Why not? Anyway, I don't have to imagine. I've already seen stranger things, since I met you."

  Chapter 15

  On leaving Sarah Tyrrell, Drakulya walked back to El Tovar, intending to consult once more with Joe Keogh, and also to ask some questions of the adoptive father of the missing girl.

  Brainard, still lying low in Joe Keogh's suite, was made uneasy by the way Mr. Strangeways looked at him. Brainard in fact impressed his caller as a man who would dearly love to become invisible.

  Under steady scrutiny, Brainard looked from Joe to Strangeways and back again. Then he ventured:

  "You're maybe—a friend of Mr. Tyrrell's?"

  Strangeways shook his head. "I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting him. We do share a certain background, however."

  Brainard nodded slowly. "I thought so. So maybe you'll be able to find my daughter?"

  "As I have told your aunt, I will do what I can to help her. First, I would like you to tell me all you can about Tyrrell."

  Brainard fumbled through several pockets before he found his cigarettes. "That won't be much. He's alive, down there somewhere, as far as I know. I haven't seen him for a long time. And I've been doing business with him over the years. Honest business. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?"

  Another question elicited the information that Brainard himself had never been down into the Canyon, not even the most mundane modern version of the place, and he seemed to have no clear idea that a Canyon of any other time or shape might be accessible. He had never even set foot on the main trails that descended from near the Village and whose upper portions at least were trampled daily by a thousand tourists. He was not expert or even interested in the out-of-doors. In fact, Brainard seemed to think it believable that a man had been hiding out for sixty years, in some sanctuary accessible without magic or its equivalent in science, within a mile or two of the swarming tourist activity on the South Rim.

  Drakulya said to him: "Tell me more about the business that you do with Tyrrell, and—since you ask—I will venture an opinion on its honesty."

  "Well sir, there's nothing wrong with the kind of business I do with Mr. Tyrrell. I'm a dealer in art. Specifically in his creations. There's nothing very complicated about our arrangement—except that most people think he's dead. But I'm not defrauding anyone; the pieces I deliver are genuine. Mr. Tyrrell carves statues, and I sell them for him. Unlike paintings, carved stone is very difficult to date, so the buyers just assume these items were done in the thirties, or even earlier. The man has a right to sell his own creations, doesn't he? And a right to employ me as an agent?"

  At this point Joe interjected: "His wife also has a legal right to his estate. But as I read the situation, she's not getting most of the money from these deals that you conclude."

  "Is Sarah complaining?" Brainard demanded.

  Mr. Strangeways made a slight gesture in Joe's direction, as if to silence him. Looking steadily at Brainard, he said: "Tell us, please, just how this arrangement began, between the two of you."

  "Sure." Brainard looked at the ceiling, considering. "It was back in the early sixties, and I was here looking over some things for my aunt—she usually does her best to avoid spending any time here. But she never has wanted to turn the place over to the Park Service completely.

  "Well, I'd come here one day to take a look at some of the furnishings in the Tyrrell House, to see what they might be worth. I was staying in the place overnight, when—he showed up, in the middle of the night. Surprised the hell out of me."

  "Showed up—under what circumstances?"

  "I was sitting there in a chair, thinking—actually I supposed I dozed off in front of a fire. Then
something woke me up—a dream, I thought at first. Then I heard someone in another room. I went to look, and he was just standing there. At first I thought he might be a burglar—but he soon convinced me he wasn't."

  "Then he made no strenuous effort to avoid discovery."

  "I—suppose not. Maybe he was curious about me."

  "And how did you recognize him?"

  "Oh, I'd seen several of the old photographs. And, being in the house, I'd also been thinking about him… but above all I think it was the way he just told me who he was, when I asked him. Very calm, low-key, and self-assured. Still, that he was really Edgar Tyrrell was a little more than I could believe at first—also, I may add, that meeting was one of the spookiest experiences of my entire life. Here's this man who was supposed to have been dead for thirty years… but, to make a long story short, I believed him. Had to. We got to talking about art, and he excused himself—disappeared, almost as if he were a ghost—and in twenty minutes he was back, carrying something that convinced me."

  "What was that?"

  "A pretty little piece, a coyote as I recall, not one of those really strange animals—he told me he'd come up to the rim to compare one of his new pieces with an old one he remembered being in the house. Of course the one he remembered wasn't there. All that was left in the house, even then, were reproductions.

  "We talked some more. When he found out I was his wife's nephew—well, his own nephew too, of course, though I could never imagine myself calling him 'uncle'—he started asking me questions about Sarah. Apparently they'd had no contact since she left him.

  "He was really curious about her, and seemed concerned. But he also made it a condition of our doing business that she was not to know I'd met him and talked to him. In fact, no one at all was to know that he was still alive."

  Brainard considered. He lit a cigarette, with hands afflicted with a noticeable tremor. "To make a long story short, after we'd talked for a considerable time, he left me his new piece to sell for him. In return he didn't want money—he had a list of tools, construction materials, things like that. 'I could obtain the material by other means,' he said. 'But this will save me time.' "

  "Always," said Mr. Strangeways, "always a question of time. In one way or another. Does it not seem so, Joseph?"

  "Yeah," said Joe abstractedly, and turned back to Brainard. "Go on."

  Brainard crushed out his cigarette in an ashtray, and went on. "After he'd gone, I began to think, and the more I thought, the less I could credit what I'd just seen. I mean, this guy would have to be ninety years old, and still active, the way he was."

  "And that was almost thirty years ago. By now he'd have to be well over a hundred. Maybe a hundred and twenty? But you're still doing business with him."

  "All right, it's crazy. I don't know. You tell me. Maybe it's his son who meets me now, or his grandson. Maybe it's his younger brother. Maybe it's Tyrrell’s ghost—I don't know, though I have my own ideas. All I do know is that he keeps bringing up carvings and I've never had any trouble selling them as authentic. I know what the collectors think, that my aunt and I have this secret hoard of Tyrrell’s that we're putting on the market gradually, one a year or so, just to keep the price up.

  "The one time an expert did question authenticity, I took his objections back to Tyrrell. And the next item Tyrrell gave me, and all the ones after that, were done in such a way that those objections wouldn't hold. I guess some people are still doubtful from time to time, but I've always been able to find a number who believe."

  "And what did you do for Tyrrell, in exchange for being made wealthy?"

  "Brought him stuff. He never wanted money, said he had no use for it. He's got some kind of cave, a hideout down there in the Canyon, that no one's ever managed to find."

  "He told you that?"

  "In a way. Little things he said from time to time. That sounds crazy too, that nobody could find his hideaway. Until you stand on the Rim here for a while and take a real look at the place." There was no doubt that Brainard believed in the plausibility of what he was saying.

  "What sort of things, exactly, did you bring him?" Joe asked.

  "I'd get him catalogs, and he'd pick out what he wanted from them, and tell me what specific tools to buy. A few times he wanted chemicals, and I'd go to a scientific supply house. Explosives, once in a while. That took a bit of doing, because you usually need a license, but I know some people. Usually it was things like rope, and generator parts, and some men's work clothing, in specific sizes. Tyrrell's sizes. Drafting materials, once…"

  "And all of this has been going on for thirty years?"

  "Almost that long, yes. He told me he'd tried other ways of getting supplies, before he met me. He said he kept running into problems with the other ways—but he didn't go into any details on that."

  "And finally you did break your agreement. You did tell Sarah that you had met him."

  Brainard nodded. "I had to, after our arrangement had been going on for a year or two. I kept coming up with more statues, and I couldn't keep that a secret, not from her. The sales were common knowledge in the field. She knew too much about her husband's work and his affairs, that there hadn't been any such backlog. So I had to explain where the statues were really coming from."

  "And what was her reaction?"

  "About like yours." Brainard sighed. "She wasn't surprised—not nearly as much as I'd expected her to be. She asked a great many questions about Tyrrell—indirectly, the way he'd asked about her."

  "She didn't want to meet him, though?"

  "No. Never suggested anything of the kind. She really didn't want to come anywhere near this place. Though she's been here a few times over the years; just in and out, never staying in the house overnight. Until now, when Cathy turned up missing."

  "And did Tyrrell ever find out that you'd broken your agreement with him?"

  Brainard shrugged wearily. "If he did, he didn't say anything. He might have guessed I'd told his wife at least. He probably realized all these posthumous sales couldn't be kept secret from her. But he must have decided just to let things go on."

  Joe's radio was buzzing, and something in the quality of the sound suggested—to him at least—that it was urgent. Answering, he heard Maria's voice.

  "Boss? Cathy Brainard is alive and well, back up on the South Rim."

  "You've seen her?"

  "I'm standing here looking at her now, right near the mule corral. She's come back up Bright Angel, just the way Bill did."

  The three men, each surprised in his different way, looked at one another for a long, silent moment.

  Joe grabbed up his cane while Maria on the radio was still giving details. In a moment he was hobbling at his best pace—notably improved since the massage by Mr. Strangeways—after the other two men who had been with him. Now Joe could almost keep up with the overweight and puffing Brainard.

  In a minute he caught up with the others near the mule corral, which was deserted at this time of day, the morning's convoy of tourist riders having descended into the Canyon hours ago, and the afternoon's contingent of returning adventurers not yet arrived.

  Maria was standing there, with a young woman who could only be Cathy Brainard. As the men arrived, Maria hurried away, with a quick word to Joe that she wanted to inform Mrs. Tyrrell.

  Joe saw Drakulya look after Maria, frowning slightly.

  Cathy was just standing still, looking weary. A large backpack that must be hers was lying at her feet.

  Brainard, his fears for himself forgotten for the moment, was standing just in front of his daughter, staring at her with obvious relief. "Thank God, you're back."

  "Hi," the girl said to him, a certain reserve in her voice. She submitted tiredly to a somewhat awkward hug.

  Holding her at arm's length, the stocky man said to his adopted daughter: "I was afraid—I never wanted you to get caught up in any of my own troubles. I never wanted that."

  "Your troubles?" It sounded to Joe as if the y
oung woman didn't know what her father was talking about, and wasn't trying very hard to find out. As if she had to make a considerable effort to bring her mind back from her own concerns.

  Nor did it escape Joe's notice that she avoided calling this man "father."

  "Kid," said Brainard. "Cathy. I'm not going to ask you any questions. I'm just glad you're back." He awkwardly stroked her hair.

  "I'm going to ask you some questions, though," Cathy flared back. "And I have some for Aunt Sarah." She looked at the strangers present. "But I guess they can wait." Brainard, looking bewildered, let her go.

  Then Cathy turned her gaze toward Strangeways. The look she gave him, casual at first, became something of a stare. "Who're you?" she demanded, with the bluntness of one determined to concentrate on matters of importance.

  Strangeways bowed slightly. His face under the broad hat brim was shadowed. "A friend of your mother's, Cathy."

  Joe put in: "He's working with me, Miss Brainard." Then it became necessary for Joe to explain his own identity, and the reasons for his presence.

  When Cathy had heard him out she looked at the investigators with some bitterness as well as weariness. "Well, I'm back now. You can call off the hunt."

  "Cathy! It was old Sarah's voice; she was approaching, as swiftly as her years would allow, from the direction of the Tyrrell House. Cathy ran toward her with open arms, and the others witnessed a more emotional reunion.

  A few minutes later, Joe, in the company of John and Mr. Strangeways, was hobbling back toward his hotel. Sarah, Cathy, and Brainard had preceded them. Silence obtained during the first part of the walk.

  "I guess we can start packing?" John suggested, when they were halfway to their destination.

  "Not I," said Mr. Strangeways.

  "How's that, sir?" John inquired.

  "I am thinking, gentlemen," said their elder companion, "of the Origin of Species."

  Joe Keogh thought for a moment. "You're talking about the book written by Charles Darwin?"

  Dark eyes turned toward him. "Not so much the book as its subject—the laws governing the development of life on earth. Tyrrell's real interest seems to be in those basic natural laws, which Darwin began to discover more than a century ago. My people as well as yours are subject to those basic laws. We are all human, all children of the earth."