A Question of Time d-7

by Fred Saberhagen

  "He'll burn, he's got to burn, goddam it. We're going to kill him, one way or another, now we've started. We've got to." He hurled the last jar into the cave.

  Their pitifully small collection of jars was used up already. Now it seemed to Jake that the jars hadn't held nearly enough kerosene—it seemed to him crazy that he had ever thought they might. But no time to worry about that now. On to part two of the plan. A piece of garden hose taken from the little irrigation system was pressed into service to convey the flammable liquid to where they wanted it.

  As Jake had foreseen, using the hose was very awkward. First one end of it had to be pushed over the barrier slab of rock, well back into the cave where Tyrrell supposedly was sleeping.

  (Would the eyes of the vampire open? Jake wondered. Would he see what was coming at him? You'd think he'd have to smell it, anyway, unless he was completely dead.)

  Then the other end of the hose had to be elevated, held high by straining human hands, while kerosene was poured into it by other hands, through the funnel which was normally used to fill the two-gallon can from the drum. Jake had to run to the house to get a chair for Camilla to stand on while she poured.

  Between episodes of these lifting and pouring efforts for which all four of their hands were needed, Camilla went running back, again and again, eventually draining all of the kerosene from the storage drum into their pot and can. Jake was cutting the wire that he'd found, and closely inspecting the slab of limestone that guarded Tyrrell’s refuge, picking out the places where he wanted to put the dynamite. He thought two sticks should do it.

  As soon as they had done all that they could do with kerosene, Jake started hand-drilling the holes for the explosive. In his left hand he gripped the drill, a simple hand tool shaped like a long chisel with a steel shank and a star-shaped cutting end. With his right arm he swung one of the middle-sized hammers from the workshop. Dust and fine chips spouted from under the biting end of the drill with every blow, and after each blow Jake rotated the cutter slightly.

  The drill, driven by no more than human muscle, sank into the rock with painful slowness, a small fraction of an inch with every blow. The workshop boasted a few electric tools, but there was no way to get power to any of them back here.

  Camilla stood by him, watching for the most part in silence, and stinking, as he did, of kerosene. Their clothes were wet with the stuff. All either of them needed was for someone to strike a match.

  "What can I do to help?" she pleaded.

  "Nothing, right now."

  The smell of kerosene saturated the air. Jake could imagine the puddle of it that must lie back in among the rocks all evaporating, dissipating into the atmosphere before they were ready to put a name to it. He told himself such thoughts were foolishness, and labored on.

  At last, the first of his hand-drilled holes was deep enough. Thank God it was only limestone that he was trying to drill, and not granite, nor the strange black Vishnu schist.

  Camilla asked again: "What can I do?"

  "Okay. Here, you hold the drill."

  Now, starting the second hole, he could use a bigger hammer, and grip it with both fists. The work went faster. Once he hit the drill only a glancing blow, and it leaped free of Camilla's grip to clang with what seemed awful loudness on the rocks. She screamed at Jake to be careful what he was doing, not to hit her arms.

  At last they had drilled the holes. Putting the dynamite and blasting caps in place was not all that difficult, but the job had its tricky aspects. Really, Jake knew very little about this, only what he had picked up before he came to the Deep Canyon, watching the experts employed by the CCC.

  He was tamping a blasting cap and its attached wire in on top of the first charge, when Camilla said suddenly: "I have to see him dead, Jake, it won't be enough to just think he's probably burned up back in there. If I don't see him with my own eyes today, I'll die waiting for it to get dark tonight—not knowing if he's really dead, or if he's coming out after us."

  Jake grunted and went on working.

  Finally the dynamite was set, tamped into both of the drilled holes with wire and blasting caps in place.

  Jake was ready to set it off. There was no reason to delay.

  He had set up the blasting machine in what he thought would be a sheltered place, behind a huge rock a hundred feet from Tyrrell's sanctuary. He attached the wires to the machine and had raised the handle to deliver a jolt of electricity when Camilla clutched at his arm.

  "What was that?" she demanded in a whisper.

  As soon as she called his attention to the sound he could hear it, sure enough. It was an inhuman or half-human sound, and Jake was sure that it came from the direction of Tyrrell's little cave. It reminded Jake of the time when as a child he'd come across a cat dying with its foot caught in a rat trap.

  There was no use waiting.

  "Here goes nothing," Jake muttered to himself. Camilla, seeing what he was about to do, crouched down.

  Jake said: "Put your head down."

  He leaned his weight on the handle, heard the armature whirr, an instant generator inside the machine. He'd put everything together right, because a hundred feet away the blast went off, two charges ripping the atmosphere in the same heartbeat. In the open air, dynamite always made less noise than Jake expected.

  He was on his feet at once, jumping out from behind his sheltering boulder and running toward Tyrrell's sanctuary through the small rock fragments falling back to earth. A dozen strides and Jake skidded to a halt, seeing with fierce despair that the explosion had not shattered the barrier rock. Only perhaps a tenth of the obstruction had been removed; the deep recess was every bit as inaccessible as before.

  Camilla joined him, saying nothing. The sight of failure wasn't the most immediately sickening thing for Jake. Worse than that was the noise now coming from the little cave. There was no longer any doubt that Tyrrell was really there, just where Camilla had kept saying that he had to be.

  There was fire back there, behind the rock, what must be a miniature lake of kerosene going up quickly in black stinking smoke. Kerosene was burning, but not only kerosene. There was something else.

  It had taken the screaming, a horrible inhuman sound, a little while to get started. But there was no doubt about it now.

  "Jake! Jake, what do we do now?"

  He stared at the remaining barrier rock, trying to visualize where its weak points must lie. He had been wrong before, but there was nothing to do now but keep trying. "Get more dynamite. We'll have to blast again. Hurry!"

  Camilla ran off at once. Jake stayed behind, planning where to drill the next set of blasting holes. If there would be time to drill them before the sun went down. The first pair seemed to have taken forever.

  The screaming coming from the deep sanctuary went on and on. On and on, unceasingly.

  Chapter 17

  Cathy Brainard was once more trudging her way down Bright Angel Trail, headed for the Deep Canyon. This time she had left all of her camping equipment behind, except for a canteen.

  And this time Maria Torres was walking stride for stride down the trail with Cathy. Maria had not even bothered bringing a canteen.

  The two young women had met, without conscious prearrangment, up on the broad pedestrian rim walk, near the Bright Angel trailhead. They had scarcely seen each other before this meeting, yet on encountering each other on the walk they had agreed within moments, with a minimum of discussion, on what they were going to do.

  "It'll be a big help if you can show me the way down," Maria had said, almost by way of greeting, staring into the gloom below. Mountain-sized buttes made purple shadow-shapes down there, beyond a miles-deep band of sunken clouds and snow-showers. "Down to where I have to go. That will save me valuable time."

  "So," Cathy had said. "They've given you the job of keeping an eye on me."

  Maria had frowned, as if she were troubled by some distant memory. "No," she had said slowly. "Maybe I'm supposed to be doing that, and ma
ybe Joe thinks I am, but I'm not. No, my reason for going down is personal. This is extremely important to me."

  "All right," Cathy had said, disbelieving. "Whatever you say, however you want to come along, for the private detectives or just for fun. How you get there is supposed to be this damned big secret, you know. A secret I wasn't supposed to remember, but I did anyway. To hell with them and their secrets. My parents, I mean. Whatever they did to me when I was a kid. I don't quite know yet what it was, but I'm going to find out."

  Maria had said nothing. She had been staring into the depths, apparently at something far, far beyond the afternoon's returning convoy of mule-mounted tourists, who were just coming into view in the middle distance, ghostly centaurs climbing out of snow and time.

  Cathy had started down the trail.

  "This time," Cathy said now, "I left a note for Aunt Sarah. She's a good lady. No use worrying her unnecessarily."

  "Maybe you shouldn't have done that," Maria said.

  "Left a note? Why not?"

  Maria didn't know why not; she couldn't say, and only gestured vaguely. But somehow the thought of Cathy's note made her uneasy.

  "You see," said Cathy, "going down the first time, I mean at Thanksgiving, that was a lot different. I didn't really know where I was headed, then. I only had a kind of memory." She paused. "Do you ever have—dreams—about your early childhood?"

  "Not any more," Maria said.

  "Memories, I should say. More like memories than dreams. Going down that time was like a dream. I saw things, real things, that I had convinced myself were only figments of my imagination. Like a certain little house. Seeing that house scared me, so I just—went camping for a while. Now I've got to go back and make sure about things, like that house, and my parents. I…" Cathy did not seem to be able to find words to complete the thought.

  "You work with Mr. Strangeways?" she asked finally. "No," said Maria, in her new vague, indifferent voice. "Not really. I've barely met him. Why?"

  "There's something spooky about him."

  "I think you're probably right about that." The two young women trudged on down the trail.

  They had gone no more than fifty yards when Cathy noticed that Maria was carrying nothing—not even a canteen—in the way of camping supplies or equipment.

  "Aren't you going to need anything?"

  "No. I'm not really—going that far." Maria was staring straight ahead of her, as if she were thinking very intently indeed. Cathy almost hesitated to interrupt such concentration.

  "You're following me, right? Checking up on me? So how do you know how far I'm going?"

  Maria shrugged.

  "Well, you're all right." Cathy shook her head, tossing her hair. "You're not going to need a canteen, because it isn't very far."

  "How do we get there?"

  "You have to know a secret. But that's all right, I remember the secret. Or else I'm crazy, and I've only been imagining things all along."

  "What kind of secret?"

  "It's a trick my father—the man who must have been my real father—taught me when I was very small. For a long time I forgot it; but once you learn something important like that, it's never quite forgotten. You know what I mean? Like riding a bicycle."

  Maria didn't answer. She was still gazing straight ahead of her as she walked, as if her thoughts were really elsewhere.

  Snow blew in the faces of the two young women, and flurries obscured the trail, above them and below. The mule train, mounting methodically, led by a mounted ranger, came into view once more, this time immediately ahead. Cathy and Maria moved as far as possible to the inside edge of the trail, letting the big, sure-footed animals walk past, each carrying a half-frozen tourist. The mounted men and women, at this stage of their adventure intent on getting back to warmth and civilization, scarcely glanced at the waiting hikers.

  The trick that Cathy had mentioned, of course, was a technique required of any traveler bound in or out of the place her parents had called the Deep Canyon. The proper technique was essential, not only to pass the barrier of time, but to arrive on the other side of that barrier somewhere near your chosen destination. It was of course necessary that the destination had been rightly chosen—and for Cathy, as she herself now thought, this journey of exploration, of rediscovery, was not only right, but inevitable.

  She tried, without much success, to discuss all these things with Maria, as the two young women continued walking down Bright Angel Trail together.

  Maria at last paid enough attention to say: "It's all new to me down here. You'll have to show me."

  "Oh, I can show you easily enough. When I was a little girl, I came down this way more times than I can remember—than I could remember. But now I'm here again, it's all coming back."

  Now the two were alone, cut off on all sides by the falling snow that had driven other visitors to cover. Cathy as she descended the trail pondered yet again the questions of her own origins: Who had her real mother been? Somehow she was almost entirely certain that her real mother, whatever her identity, had been dead for a long time. And who, really, was the man that she rememberedas the father of her childhood?

  Gradually, in the course of growing up as Brainard's adopted daughter, Cathy had come to realize that her adoption had made her a relative of old Edgar Tyrrell, an important but vastly eccentric artist who in the dim past of the thirties had built the Tyrrell House, among his other achievements. But until very recently Tyrrell and his ancient affairs had never loomed large in Cathy Brainard's thoughts. She had never had any cause to connect the half-famous artist, whose name appeared on statues, in books, and in museums, with the vague memory she nursed of her 'real' father. The dates were just hopelessly wrong, to begin with.

  Nor, until Cathy arrived by chance at the Canyon this year, at the age of seventeen, had she ever had any reason, or any desire, to visit the house on the South Rim.

  Cathy was vaguely aware that her adoptive father sometimes visited the Canyon on business trips—though Brainard seldom discussed business in front of her. But people at home almost never talked about the Tyrrell House in her presence, and she had had no idea that she had ever been there before.

  Until she saw the place. Then, at first glance, she was certain that it had once been her home.

  Cathy, absorbed in thought, almost passed up the turning when they reached it, almost missed the proper place to work the trick. But she did recognize the place in time, despite the snow. The two young women turned off Bright Angel, following what looked like a deer trail, leading nowhere. But Cathy made the turnoff without hesitation.

  In Cathy's awareness there had been floating the memory of certain old photographs of Edgar Tyrrell, pictures she had come across from time to time, in magazines or books. She was certain of having seen at least one such photo, framed, in the Rim House, and it seemed to her there had been another in one of the Canyon guidebooks she and her girlfriends had seen in the early stage of her Thanksgiving visit, in their room at one of the lodges.

  And at Aunt Sarah's home on Long Island, Cathy knew, the old lady still kept one or two such photos, black and white, taken with a boxy old thirties camera. On rainy childhood afternoons young Cathy, browsing through a past in which she had never thought to find herself a native, had come across those pictures more than once. Somehow those pictures had become confused—or so she had long thought—with her real memories, of a real man she once had called her father.

  The snow inside the Canyon stopped falling, and the air warmed. The sky remained cloudy, but the quality of light changed, suggesting dusk in the Deep Canyon, but no longer suggesting winter. Visibility increased.

  "Yes, this is the place," said Cathy quietly. They were in some kind of a side canyon now, vastly smaller than the big one. A creek, narrow enough to step across, came gurgling down the middle. The narrow trail, or path, generally following the creek, took the young women in single file around some dwarfish cottonwoods. They had arrived in sight of the cottage, whic
h stood only fifty yards or so ahead. Its windows were lightless, and the whole place looked uninhabited and uninviting.

  Cathy stopped in her tracks, gazing at the little structure. Maria halted uncertainly beside her.

  "I lived in that house once," Cathy said. "Not for very long, I think. But I did live there."

  She glanced at Maria, who, silent and dreamy-eyed, was obviously thinking her own thoughts, not paying much attention to her companion or to the cottage.

  A strange way for a detective to act, Cathy thought. But Cathy was concentrating on her own thoughts too. She added aloud: "I bet my father still lives here, maybe not in the house but somewhere nearby. I have that feeling."

  That caught Maria's interest at least faintly. "Your father? Gerald Brainard?"

  "Not him." Now Cathy sounded contemptuous. "My real father. The one I remember from when I was a little girl."

  Slowly the two young women approached the silent cottage. A faint steady roar in the background, half-smothered by the noise of the stream, suggested some kind of machinery at work.

  "How long since you've seen him?" Maria asked. She appeared to be trying to pull herself out of her apathy, struggling against the half-awake feeling and behavior that had claimed her all the way down.

  "It must be about twelve years," said Cathy. She frowned, having made an unsatisfactory mental calculation. "And my great-aunt Sarah might have lived here too—but that would have been more like fifty years ago. No, maybe even sixty."

  Lately Cathy had found it almost impossible to make anything satisfactory regarding time. Two days of her Thanksgiving trip had turned somehow into a month; at least, everyone else agreed that she had been gone a month, though on her personal time scale the camping trip could have lasted no more than a couple of days.

  Nearing the cottage, Cathy and Maria were accosted by a large calico cat, looking no more than half domesticated. The creature sat in the narrow path before them, mewing as if demanding something; then it darted away into the sparse shrubbery as they approached.

  "It's Beagle," breathed Cathy in an awed voice.