Thorn

by Fred Saberhagen

  “On your honor?”

  The question had sounded grimly serious. And it was taken seriously, as Joe Keogh must have known it would be. Lithely but slowly Thorn arose from his crackling bed of rest, to stand with squinted eyes fixed on some point in the burning sky outside his tinted window. “Yes, on my honor, Joseph.”

  “All right.” The distant voice reluctantly gave in. The scratch of some writing implement told that Lieutenant Keogh was making notes. “I’ll see what I can find out. Give me your number and when I have something I’ll call you back.”

  “I shall be waiting for your call. Oh, Joe, one more thing. You might try to learn whether the young lady has ever been in Idaho.”

  Thorn put down the phone, then picked it up again and dialed the front desk. “Have there been any calls for me?”

  “Yes sir, there was one, as I recall. About half an hour ago. A lady, but she didn’t leave her name.”

  “Thank you.” Half an hour ago he had been asleep; more than asleep. Waiting now, in no hurry, Thorn strolled to stand at the high windows and confront the daylight world through slotted blinds and tinted glass. An inferno of sun out there; he peered at it as into a blast furnace. Later in the afternoon he would rest more, and then go out again at sunset. Right now the high view made him think of flying. It helped to take his mind off certain things in the far past, things about which nothing could now be done. Nevertheless they were lately coming back, for some reason, to bother him. Most likely because he had again seen the painting at long last. He watched the smoggy landscape until even the filtered light began to make a dull pain behind his eyes. Then he drew the drapes shut and turned away.

  Why should it bother him, irritate him so much, that the identical Christian name had been borne by two runaway girls half a millennium apart? A million other runaways down through the centuries must have borne it also, in aimless flight, great unsung migration, across Europe and America and God alone knew where.

  Apparently there had even been a certain physical resemblance between the two … also shared with more other girls than even God could count. No, he told himself sharply, stop this now. Helen, your second wife, is dead, has been for five hundred years in some unknown grave, and only on the Last Day, if then, will you see her again. Or hear her voice. Leonardo had not known how to record that.

  The voice on the phone had certainly not been one that he, Thorn, had ever heard before. He could be sure of that, at least. As sure as one in this sad, mad world could ever be of anything…

  God and damnation. He had walked into an auction room, and had simply stood there, surrounded by strangers, and looked at an old picture. And there had been tears in his eyes. In his eyes. What next?

  A reminder, anyway, that not even he was immune to change. Though he had known for some time that he was not.

  It could not have happened to Helen as it had to him. It could not. He would have known, must have known, centuries ago. After all that had been between them in his breathing days, he must, he must have been aware centuries ago of her altered but continued life. He had no reason to think that anything of the sort had happened to her. Only to one in ten million or a hundred million did such change come.

  But he was changing. Doors were opening around him, and he was trying to read the symbols on them.

  Last night he had spent hours prowling secretly inside the Seabright house. There he had slid past real doors and tried to discover real things. He had watched the occupants while unseen himself, and had listened to them while remaining unheard. In most of their private actions they were as banal as everybody else. Despite all his alertness and his new readiness to discover subtle meanings, he had been able to find out surprisingly little.

  The people had been asleep most of the time he watched them, servants and masters alike, and he had listened to their incoherent mutterings as they slept. Listened and watched carefully, though he had known for ages now that the secrets of the bedroom were for the most part very dull, like those films made by scientific researchers whose excruciatingly patient cameras dutifully record the writhings of pajamaed volunteers in semipublic sleep, the sleepers now and then twitching and generating brain waves with the onset of dreams.

  He still had dreams himself. Not many who knew his true name would have guessed that he himself, here this very afternoon in this very hotel bed, at about the time when some unknown woman was trying to reach him by telephone, had seen an infant nursing at the breast of Mary Rogers, an infant girl who had turned to look at Thorn with Helen Hunyadi’s five-hundred-year-dead eyes. And then he had seen Giulio Boccalini, suffering with sword wounds and calling himself Gliddon, had helped Mary Magdalen to carry a small wrecked aircraft down a steep and pine-grown mountainside…

  Dreams could sometimes be of real help. But Thorn had no reason to think that this afternoon’s had included anything at all veridical.

  He sat down near the phone again, waiting patiently for Joe’s call. Age taught patience, in his solitude Thorn made no effort to look like anything but what he was. His chest performed no breathing motions. His eyes stared, blank and unblinking, staring perhaps at nothing. No part of his body moved, except for the fingers of his left hand, which played gently with the worn gold ring on the third finger of his right.

  Last night, prowling alone through the Seabright mansion, Thorn had come upon a locked, plain, heavy door adjoining the subterranean art gallery. Naturally he had investigated, and had discovered beyond the door a rather extensive laboratory facility. He was no scientist, or technologist either, but had been able to identify in a general way a mass of photographic and video recording equipment. There were concealed see throughs leading to the lounge-game room, so whatever went on there could be secretly recorded. The lab held other scientific equipment also, the purpose of which Thorn could not immediately fathom. It looked vaguely medical to him. There was a small, almost cell-like anteroom to the concealed laboratory. This anteroom contained a metal cot, folded now as if for storage, a simple table and a chair. A toilet and shower were in an adjoining cubicle; neither had been used for some days.

  A large wall safe in the laboratory, concealed under a large but very minor painting, had room enough inside to contain Thorn’s whole body once he had altered form enough to let him flow in through the almost perfect sealing of its door. There was no real light inside, but enough infrared radiation to let him see essentials. The safe stored mostly cassettes of video tape, and canisters of film. He opened one of the latter and examined, as well as possible under the circumstances, the reel that it contained. He could see enough frames of film, all showing nude figures in full color grappling orgiastically, to be sure what kind of film it was.

  Well, a Seabright porn factory. That was no real surprise, after he had met Ellison. A private operation, no doubt; this family would hardly be in it for the money.

  Thorn stood outside the safe again, leaning a newly resolidified hand upon the wood frame of its concealing painting. The precautions seemed somewhat exaggerated, in this day and age, to hide mere porn. Was there some other angle, purpose, to the concealed records? Blackmail? But that too now seemed rather outmoded. There was something here that deserved thinking about. He could come back later, if he decided it was important, and look again.

  Right now he closed his eyes. Like the rest of the house, these laboratory rooms had had many people in them at various times in the past. He could not be specific about a number but he had the feeling that the number was surprisingly high. People had been paraded through here, he sensed suddenly, one at a time, several days or weeks or months apart, for a period of years. Most of them had been young, he thought. A certain flavor of the house of the Boccalini…

  Upstairs in the mansion again, he prowled the silent hallway, which was lit by a backwash of outdoor security lights coming in through curtained windows on one side. He stopped at one closed bedroom door after another, trying to get a feeling for which room had been Helen Seabright’s. He thought he coul
d detect the aura of Mary Rogers’ past occupancy in one bedroom. Ellison Seabright’s gross snore obviated any need for subtlety in telling where he slept.

  Here … in this room some young female, but not Mary, had spent a good deal of time a few months past. Thorn went in, through the crack of the closed door. The room had been stripped of almost all furnishings, but some things remained. Traces of young merriment, and fear … and considerable unhappiness … and just a touch of old perfume.

  The occupant was certainly no one Thorn had ever known before. And she certainly had not been a vampire, either.

  He found another room, one that had certainly been Delaunay Seabright’s before the night of kidnapping and murder. This room too was now unused. Thorn stood in solid form in the center of its floor, mulling over in his mind the few photographs of the former occupant that had appeared at the time of the kidnapping and murder, when word of the painting’s existence in the private Delaunay Seabright collection had first reached public print. Those pictures had shown Delaunay as having a fairly strong resemblance to his half-brother Ellison, though Ellison was ten or fifteen years younger.

  The bedroom’s furniture remained, perhaps because it was so massive, grandly antique. But the picture hangers on the walls were all empty now, and faint marks in a light layer of dust on some shelves showed where other objects had lately been removed; Ellison must be already scavenging. Any material object that might have helped Thorn to grasp the late owner’s personality had, it seemed, already been removed. And this personality seemed harder to grasp than that of the dead girl. About all that was left was a little dust, some large impersonal furnishings, and shadows.

  Thorn passed down the upstairs hall again, rather like a shadow himself, and silently entered the bedroom of Ellison Seabright. It was a guest room, really, but Ellison had made it his own. A snoring mound of body, clothed in an eastern garment of silken decadence, floated quite alone in a vast waterbed. Thorn did not gaze long upon this spectacle, but turned promptly to a door that connected this bedroom with another. With an anticipatory quickening of the pulse he entered the chamber he had been saving until last.

  Stephanie Seabright’s rumpled bed was empty. She sat nude in a soft chair before a softly lighted triple mirror, looking at her multiple images in the glass, and for a moment Thorn thought that she understood, had sensed his presence, and was waiting for him. Almost, he began to resume man-form. But he delayed a little, watching; and presently he understood that her attention was focused wholly on herself.

  A luxurious robe was crumpled on the white carpet at Stephanie’s feet. A small glass that smelled like pure vodka stood on the dressing table before her, bottle at hand to match.

  Stephanie stood up suddenly, chair toppling behind her, and Thorn saw that what gripped her was fear. Not of him. She still had no awareness, consciously at least, that he was there. It was not a sudden fear, but one that had been growing, and still grew. Her attention was still on her own reflections.

  Age was the terror.

  Age, abetted by too much sun in some careless summer not too many summers past, was beginning to make the skin wrinkle. Here at the armpit when the arm was down, there at the corners of the eyes. Time soon to consider cosmetic surgery and all its implications. The shape of the breasts, even though they were small, hinted at sagging; the flesh on the thighs was no longer of perfect smoothness, but had begun to be slightly mottled with subcutaneous fat…

  He could have appeared to her, a dim male figure standing or sitting in a pose devoid of menace, an apparition so gentle that she would not scream. He knew exactly how he might have done it. Experience rather than pride assured him that the seduction would be easy, and he could foresee its every move. Within an hour he would be able to taste her blood … she would perhaps begin to understand the centuries of youth that he could offer her … and she would tell him all she knew about the painting…

  Which, unfortunately, would probably not be much.

  Did his unknown opponent know him? Had it been calculated by that invisible but unavoidable foe that tonight Count Dracula would seduce Stephanie Seabright?

  The man now calling himself Thorn could perceive, not far ahead of him in time and space, some blunder he must not make, a tripwire he must never touch. A life of half a thousand years well stocked with perils had taught his inner senses a great deal about danger, and had also taught his conscious mind to trust such inner warnings when they came. He must be careful, very careful now. He could be no more concrete about it than that. But the danger was vital. A trap, whether consciously set for him or not, lay there, not far ahead, and he had to identify it, move around it somehow, before he could advance. The phantom tripwire held him back, prevented his approaching Stephanie, prevented also his returning to the adjoining room and bluntly, brutally interrogating Seabright about the missing painting.

  He waited long minutes in Stephanie’s room, invisible, watching, waiting for a sign. Until weariness and vodka overcame her, and she clothed herself again in the rich robe that lay on the floor, and fell back, weeping, into her solitary bed.

  * * *

  Now, in his own solitary room at the hotel, Thorn played and replayed in memory the singularly unrewarding visit. Thoughts came and went, all of them discouragingly unpractical. He had watched and listened to the news, and there was no word yet on the missing plane. A massive search was underway but everyone knew success was doubtful.

  The tripwire was still there, he could feel it. Immunity to personal fear often made personal danger stand out with precise cold clarity when it came. And danger there was, in the near future, though just where and when he would encounter it he did not know.

  Or could the instincts of half a thousand years be wrong for once, and he was confronting nothing but shadows? If a painted image could wring tears out of his eyes…

  When the phone rang at last, Thorn roused from reverie with a quite human start. Outside the high windows the fires of day had dimmed considerably. Looking at his watch, he saw that hours had passed.

  He lifted the instrument. “Thorn here.”

  Joe Keogh’s voice said: “I found out from the archdiocese that Mary Rogers did work here in Chicago as you described. She’s never had anything in the way of a criminal record in this state or any other. We’d know if she did, because she was so heavily investigated after the Phoenix killings. Everyone connected with that affair was. And you asked about Idaho; she did live out there in a convent for a couple of months, about two years ago. That’s all I’ve been able to find out.”

  “I see. Thank you. And Mr. O’Grandison?”

  “Well, he’s something else, not exactly what you’d call a winner. He does have a record here in Illinois: marijuana user, cocaine user, no evidence that he’s ever done any dealing. He’s twenty-one now, according to our records; been in and out of juvenile homes and mental hospitals since he was twelve. No connection with illegal porn is shown; doesn’t mean there couldn’t be one, of course. Six months ago he was charged with contributing to delinquency—girl about fifteen years old who gave the name of Annie Chapman. But this girl disappeared from a detention home somehow before the case came to court, so it had to be dropped.”

  “Annie Chapman.”

  “You know her?”

  “I do not think so, Joe.” A girl named Annie, just a runaway. She didn’t count. “Pray continue.” The tone of Joe’s voice had suggested to Thorn that news of importance was still to come.

  “All right. I’ve talked to an officer on the force here who remembers O’Grandison. And he says O’Grandison was in the right time and place to have met Helen Seabright when she was here on her runaway. No evidence that he actually did, but he was on the scene or very near it.”

  “Annie Chapman too?”

  “We don’t know where she came from, what she might have been involved in, or where she went. There was some mixup at that juvenile home, evidently; they just let her walk out.”

  “Joe, you ar
e sounding interested. Almost excited.”

  “That’s a very big case out there, the Seabright thing, and now the missing treasure. I hope you meant it about giving me a tip when you can.”

  “Hmm. And where is Patrick O’Grandison now?”

  Caution returned. “Why do you want to talk to him?”

  “Joe, Joe, I have said that I mean him no harm.” Thorn smiled, very slightly. “Have I ever told you a lie?”

  “Yes, goddam it, you have. Don’t treat me like a kid.”

  The smile went away. “Have I ever lied, after pledging my solemn word?”

  There was a sigh in the distance. “No, I’ll give you that. Also I know you saved my life once, and Kate’s … all right. My informant said he thought little Pat was still in town here. Are you coming after him?”

  “Perhaps later, Joe; not immediately. Consider my word pledged on that much, if you like. I am busy with other matters.”

  “Listen.” Joe’s voice had altered. “Kate’s told me that Judy’s out there in the Southwest, for a summer school or camp or whatever they call it, near Santa Fe. Mountains, horseback, opera under the stars, and so on. I mention the fact only because I assume you know all about it already. I don’t suppose there’s any use my trying to talk to you about Judy, how young she is.”

  She had, as a matter of fact, recently turned eighteen; Thorn had sent a discreet birthday gift. (Ah, Mina, you must understand. He could do no less, seeing the family resemblance over four generations, seeing so much of you in her.)

  “You are a truly moral man, Joseph.” Thorn called him Joseph only rarely. “Thank you, you have been most helpful.”

  He hung up the phone. What Joe, like many other breathing people, failed to appreciate was how young all breathing women were—those utterly enticing creatures!—when seen from the viewpoint of an age of five hundred plus. Certainly differences exist between eighteen, say, and thirty-six, and again between thirty-six and seventy-two. But they are not really such great differences as breathing males seem to think. Delightfully subtle dissimilarities, rather, with the elder blood having its own bouquet, the blood of full womanhood its own of course, and of course in the young the sweet elixir of youth itself…