A Question of Time d-7

by Fred Saberhagen

Camilla had pulled herself together and come to stand beside him.

  Jake nodded and smiled, saving his breath for work. He put down his hammer for a moment, leaning against the barrier rock to rest, wiping sweat from his forehead, and from his face, long days unshaven, with the sleeve of his work shirt.

  Camilla came to give him an embrace.

  Without warning, Tyrrell's scorched hand came groping out of the recess. The thin limb struck like a black snake wearing the ashen remnants of a sleeve, the arm extending itself unbelievably far. The grab missed Jake's arm by a fraction of an inch, and caught Camilla by the collar of her shirt.

  Jake let out an incoherent sound of horror, dropped his hammer and jumped back. But the vampire's groping hand had now fastened on Camilla—she was being dragged helplessly into the small aperture between two unyielding surfaces of rock. The sound she made now was less a scream than a prolonged sob.

  Jake stepped forward again. He picked up the metal drill, half as long as a baseball bat, and heavier, and swung it directly against Tyrrels almost skeletal wrist—to no effect. The sensation of impact that traveled back up the drill and into Jake's own hands was as if he had struck the massive rock itself. The blackened hand did not release its grip.

  Camilla's body was braced, all her muscles straining as she struggled to keep herself from being forced, crushed, into the narrow aperture. Her sobbing made coherent words: "No, Jake, use wood! Use wood!"

  Jake dropped the drill. He grabbed up the longest hammer, and tried pounding with the handle at Tyrrell's arm. When that had no effect he changed his tactics, using the handle like a lever, jamming it into the narrow crevice between rocks, making a fulcrum of one angle of the big rock slab. With all his strength he forced Tyrrell's burned wrist against another rock.

  Once more, the man in the cave screamed horribly.

  His blackened, bony fingers still refused to release Camilla's collar, but now the fabric of the shirt was ripping.

  Part of the garment, collar and shoulder and sleeve, tore completely away. With a final cry, as if she might be dying, the young woman fell to the ground, out of the vampire's reach.

  Jake grabbed her under the arms, pulled her even farther from the blackened arm that still groped in search of breathing flesh.

  "Come on, Cam, we're not done yet. Come on, you've still got to help me. We still have to drill another hole." It would have to be done, obviously, in a place where Tyrrell could not possibly reach them as they worked.

  "All right." Camilla dragged herself back to her feet.

  They worked, in a nightmare of heat and exhaustion, in a persistent numbing stench of kerosene, while the treacherous sun slid swiftly down the sky. Sometimes, from the corners of their eyes, they saw one of Tyrrell's ruined arms come groping desperately out again.

  There came a time when Jake had to rest. Camilla, now almost wholly recovered as far as he could tell, brought him food while he rested.

  At last Jake, measuring with the drill, decided that the final hole was deep enough to hold a charge.

  Once more, with shaking fingers, he crimped high explosives and blasting caps together, along with one end of a length of wire.

  "Hurry, hurry." Camilla, in a shaking whisper, had begun to chant a litany.

  It seemed to Jake that time was going crazy. How could a full day of sunlight have slipped away so quickly?

  Shadows were lengthening, the hours of daylight almost gone.

  Inside the cave, darkness was firmly re-established, and the man in there had ceased to struggle visibly. He had fallen completely silent.

  Eventually, with the two breathers huddled in the same shelter as before, Jake managed to set off a second blast.

  Running out from his shelter as before, amid a shower of splintered rock, he needed only a single glance at the barrier to know that he had failed again. Once again a thick slice of the obstacle had been blasted away, but the main bulk still stood. Maybe one more shot would do it. Maybe.

  Fatalistically Jake surveyed his tools and blasting materials. Even if he had the stuff for a third blast, which was doubtful, he lacked anything like the time to prepare one.

  Dragging Camilla to her feet, he started moving with her, an exhausted shuffle down-canyon in the direction of the river. "Come on," he urged. 'Where, Jake? Where?"

  He kept his mouth shut. He didn't want to say anything, for fear that the half-dead thing in the little cave might hear him.

  Dragging, half-carrying Camilla with him, Jake made the best time he could, down the trail to the river.

  All along he had had in the back of his mind this final try at escape, something to do when all else failed. If they could get to the river there was a chance they might survive the rapids. And now there was a chance that Tyrrell, injured as he was, would not be able to pursue them past that barrier, or could not catch them if he did. If the rapids killed them, well, any quick death would be better than what was coming for them here at sundown.

  Leaping freely beside Jake as he stumbled along, too weak to run, the foaming water of the little creek babbled warnings and strange curses.

  Camilla at his side seemed to be delirious, or almost, mumbling warnings. The last rays of the day's sun came through a notch in the western cliffs, to burn briefly on her face unnoticed.

  Minutes later, with Camilla still at his side, Jake went plunging into the swift icy water of the river that ought to have been the Colorado.

  At the last moment, right at the waterline, he seized a large piece of driftwood and dragged it with him. He wasn't a strong swimmer, but the wood allowed him some hope of keeping himself afloat. He tried to call to Camilla to take hold of the log as well, but she was already gone ahead of Jake, disappeared into the torrent.

  The sun was now completely down.

  The rocks on which the current tore itself to foam were black in the sky's last fading light. These were the deepest rocks of all the layers through which the Colorado cut.

  The water was a shock of cold, followed immediately by a greater shock of impact. Lights whirled and flashed before Jake's eyes, and he saw, or imagined that he saw, first one white nodule protruding from a rock, and then a forest of them.

  And Jake, in the few moments before the current slammed him even harder against more rocks, was sure that he could hear Tyrrell, released by sunset and howling like a windstorm, coming after him to make sure of his revenge.

  But other hands than Tyrrells caught at Jake first, and held him up. Bright light, like colored searchlights reflecting from the river, was all around him.

  Whatever happened, Camilla was still with him. He could no longer see her face, but, whatever strange thing was happening to them now, he knew that she was near.

  Chapter 19

  Maria on straying out of the cottage into the dusk followed the same call that had brought her down into the Deep Canyon. She went exploring, looking for the source of the attraction.

  The call was voiceless and soundless, but somehow unmistakable and almost irresistible, like the voices of friends, and—this struck Maria as very odd—of devoted pets. It led her past the workshop-cave, all dark and silent, and upstream along the little creek.

  She walked on in the certainty that something—glorious—was waiting for her, just a little farther upstream. Something—she did not know what—but something truly glorious.

  The afternoon of New Year's Eve had arrived on the South Rim. The last hours of 1991 were running out.

  "All right," Joe Keogh said. "They're both gone. Cathy left a note, this time. Is anyone going to argue that Maria might have just wandered off by accident?"

  No one of the group assembled in the main room of the Tyrrell House was going to defend that theory.

  The gathering included Sarah, Bill, and John, as well as Joe himself, and Mr. Strangeways. Mounted predatory heads looked down with bared fangs from the log walls.

  Curious stone animals, the work of Edgar Tyrrell, stared from shelves and tables.

 
Old Sarah looked at Mr. Strangeways. She said: "Cathy has gone down into the Deep Canyon again. Can you get her back this time? Somehow I doubt it."

  Drakulya did not immediately respond. He was in a particularly dark mood. The signs were subtle, but to Joe, who had known him for years, they were unmistakable.

  John Southerland started to say: "Maria must have followed Cathy—"

  The bearded man turned from the window, where he had been watching occasional snowflakes, with an outburst of anger. "No!"

  "No?"

  "No. The two young women may be together, but only accidentally. I ought to have recognized the hand that was on her!"

  "On Maria?"

  "Of course!"

  Cathy, standing in the entrance to the workshop-cave and looking out, was astonished and frightened to see Maria approaching, in the company of a whirl of lights, a monstrous, glowing presence.

  At first glance it had appeared to Cathy that the figure walking at Maria's side was a young man in work clothes. But amid a swirl of lights he disappeared, to be immediately replaced by the image of a young woman with red hair, similarly dressed.

  Cathy retreated a step, reaching for Tyrrell's arm. "What is it, Father?"

  Tyrrell's eyes were glowing, his voice was reverent. "It is the life of the planet, daughter. The light of the world."

  For just a flash of time a new shape was visible among the lights: a saber-toothed tiger. Cathy thought she could not have been mistaken. Then all three figures reappeared in rapid succession, followed by a flurry of others, less distinct.

  With the onset of this kaleidoscopic display, Maria seemed to pull free of whatever influence had made her walk so trustingly beside this incredible companion. Catching sight of Cathy and Tyrrell standing at the entrance to the workshop-cave, she ran toward them.

  "I don't know where I am!" she cried. "Cathy, help me. I don't know what's happening!"

  Cathy would have stepped forward to try to help, but her father's hand on her arm, immovable, held her back.

  Maria looked desperately from one of them to the other. She made a choking noise, and in a moment had gone running off into the darkness.

  Stalking slowly, unhurried, the thing of light began to follow her. Once more its shape was simply that of a young man, walking.

  "Father, what is it?" This time Cathy made the question an intense demand.

  "Your friend will not be harmed, girl. Perhaps she will be allowed to feel the embrace of the earth, of life itself. Perhaps she will even be granted a kind of immortality. What happier fate could any of us hope for?"

  Cathy stared at her father. Then, suddenly terrified, she broke away and ran impulsively down-canyon, going in the opposite direction from that taken by Maria and her leisurely pursuer.

  Cathy's father was shouting something after her. But he made no move to bring her back.

  Up in the Tyrrell House on the South Rim, Drakulya was insisting that the rescue operation be methodically organized, even if they delayed the start a little.

  He warned those who were going with him that they were volunteering for a perilous foray into a territory where none of them had ever been before: the territory of the vampire Edgar Tyrrell.

  "More importantly, we are going into the domain of a unique creature. One that is stranger than any vampire I have ever known—and in some ways, at least, more dangerous."

  Joe Keogh said: "One of my people is missing. We all understand it's dangerous; now how soon do we get started?"

  "You do not get started, Joseph. You remain here, on the Rim."

  "My ankle is all right."

  "It is not. Great agility may be needed down below. More than two or three people will not be needed." Strangeways looked at John Southerland and Bill Burdon. "You two will come with me."

  "The more people we have," said Joe, "the better we can search."

  Bill, unconsciously ignoring the man who was still formally his employer, acknowledged the orders of the new leader with a businesslike nod. John, who had some idea of what he might be getting into, looked very thoughtful. But he nodded too.

  "I've still got Brainard's gun," Joe said suddenly.

  Drakulya looked at him again. "Then I think you should give it to whichever of these young men you think better able to use it. We may also face mundane perils below, against which firearms could be helpful."

  "Once we get down there," Bill was volunteering, "I can probably find my way back to the place where I found Cathy's camp."

  "That may be useful. We shall see."

  Meanwhile Joe was pulling out the parts of the revolver. He had carried it, disassembled, in his coat pockets to this meeting, on the chance it might be wanted. "It'll just take me a minute to put this back together."

  Drakulya viewed the pieces of firearm with innate distaste, but nodded. "No doubt it will be effective against certain creatures of the Miocene, who as I understand have no respect at all for humanity. I expect to be fully occupied with other matters."

  At this point old Sarah emerged from the bedroom, where she had changed into trousers and a woolen shirt.

  "Mr. Strangeways, I am going with you."

  No one said anything. Everyone present looked at Sarah's aged, frail form.

  But she persisted. "How will you find the cottage, and the cave, if I do not show you? I think Cathy will have gone there, this time, and I suppose the other one is with her."

  Strangeways gave his little reptilian sigh. "Your suggestion has merit," he conceded.

  Joe was outraged. "If an eighty-year-old woman is going—"

  The bearded leader silenced him, for the moment, with a raised hand.

  "If you do not take me with you," continued Sarah, "I shall go down by myself, if I die on the way. Two young lives are at stake."

  Drakulya studied her for a long moment, then bowed lightly. "As you wish," he said. "In the face of such determination—" He looked at Joe. "Very well, both of you. Provided you follow my orders."

  A few minutes later, Drakulya led his four followers out of the house. Old Sarah, jacketed and booted like the rest, walked beside him, leaning lightly on his arm. Her eyes were dreamy, as if in her mind she had already completed this journey into the past. The little procession passed into the snow-hazed light of midafternoon, moving unnoticed among tourists toward Bright Angel trailhead.

  Joe now had Brainard's revolver, reassembled, loaded and tucked into an inside pocket of his winter jacket. Everyone but Sarah was carrying a canteen and some trail food.

  Cathy, fleeing into darkness from the lighted workshop-cave, turned to see her father apparently engaged in some kind of friendly discussion with the thing of lights and changing shapes—somehow, she thought, he must have called it back from following Maria.

  But she, Cathy, could not go near the thing. Suppressing a sob, she turned and ran again. The night was not yet too dark for her to find a path. For whatever reason, she was not pursued.

  The night, under a sky that held what looked like a million stars and an incredibly large crescent of a moon, never grew too dark for Cathy to find a place to walk. But the absence of familiar constellations was disconcerting, and the cacophony of unfamiliar animal noises even more so. Ignoring these oddities as best she could, she pushed on down the canyon. This was still her childhood home.

  On the bank of the marvelous, starlit river she paused to rest, sitting on a boulder, thinking of what her father—she could not help still thinking of him as her real father—had told her about rapids in the flow of time.

  Time passed. The sound of a footstep moving gravel jarred Cathy back to an awareness of her immediate surroundings.

  It was only Maria, approaching in the starlight.

  "Cathy? Thank God it's you. Help me. It—that thing—has stopped chasing me. But it wants me."

  "Those people, moving in the light?"

  "They're not really people, not any more. There are at least two of them in it now. They come out and talk sometimes, and I though
t at first that they were real. But I'm sure now that they're not really people any more. They're just in there, with all those—animals. All part of one great—thing."

  Maria came close, and stood directly in front of Cathy.

  Cathy said: "My father wouldn't—" But then she remembered her father's vague warnings about danger in the Deep Canyon, what he had said about Maria's fate not mattering.

  "Cathy."

  "What?"

  "Stay with me. How long is it till dawn?"

  "I don't know."

  "What are we going to do?"

  "When it's light again we'll go back to the house."

  "And then?"

  "And then I don't know."

  The five people slowly descending Bright Angel Trail had left the late twentieth century and its swarming tourists well behind them. Drakulya and his four followers moved through a shrunken, adolescent Canyon, among the flora and fauna that flourished a million years before they were born.

  It was still daylight, or it was daylight again, under clouds. There was light enough to see a snarling, furry nightmare approaching among the rocks and scanty brush, to see it before it became an immediate threat. Joe, aiming to kill, sent a revolver bullet close enough to discourage the approach of a saber-toothed tiger.

  Studying the landscape warily, he observed how something that looked like a wolf—and yet was somehow different from any other wolf that he had ever seen—watched this demonstration intently from a little distance.

  "What was that?" asked John, pointing in another direction. "I thought I saw an elephant."

  "A hairy elephant," confirmed Bill's voice. "Those tusks, they looked like shovels."

  Joe carried the heavy pistol ready in his right hand. The group pressed on, with Drakulya in the lead, a leader who paid no attention to such mundane matters as a few restless predators. To him they were simply animals, not worthy of much concern. Sarah was still at the leader's side, and now, more often than not, he was carrying the old woman, lifting her over obstacles as if she weighed no more than a glove.

  Meanwhile she gave directions in a weak but eager voice.

  They had reached the very dooryard of the little house before Cathy came out to greet them.