Thorn

by Fred Saberhagen

  “It’s very nice of you to help out,” said Mary Rogers, her blue eyes looking up trustfully at Thorn as he unlocked and opened for her the right-side door of his rented Blazer. Her strong legs in worn blue jeans swung her athletically up into the vehicle. “Robby had to take the Ford,” she added, when Thorn had gone round to his own doorway on the driver’s side and was climbing in.

  “I understand.” Thorn first secured his seat belt properly—his sometimes ferocious conflicts with machinery were never his fault—and then put the key into the ignition. Presently he was driving down the swooping ramp from the hotel garage, squinting through sunglasses as he pulled into the city street awash with the molten daylight of late afternoon. The sun itself, he had made sure, was safely behind some buildings. It would not be getting any higher today. Robinson Miller, whose more-or-less-gainful employment was with the local Public Defender’s office, was working late this evening, visiting on his own time with clients said to be in great need. And a couple of hours ago Mary had received a phone call from the Seabright house. A woman on the staff there, a Mrs. Dorlan, who Mary had apparently got to know during her residence at the mansion, had told her that her remaining belongings were ready to be picked up.

  “She sounded sort of in a hurry. Why they’re all of a sudden in such a hurry to get rid of the stuff, I don’t know. Cleaning house, I guess. But I feel more comfortable going over there if I have someone with me. And you did volunteer earlier.”

  “I assuredly did.” That of course had been before his first visit to the mansion, when he was still looking for an invitation of some kind, any kind, to let him cross the Seabright threshold. But now he welcomed any good reason to be alone with Mary.

  She said: “I suppose they’ll just have the stuff piled out on the porch. There isn’t very much.”

  Thorn snarled faintly at an errant Volkswagen. “I take it you have not yet told Helen’s mother of that strange telephone call?”

  “Stephanie’s not much of a mother. A nasty thing to say but it’s true. Anyway I don’t think she’d talk to me. I could write her a note about the call but she’d never believe it.”

  Thorn did not argue that. “Then I suppose you have not informed the police, either.”

  Mary was studying him. “No, we haven’t. You said something about an official connection that you have. I’d like to know what you found out through that.”

  “Not much. Confirmation of things you had already told me. No hint that Helen might be still alive.” The last sentence seemed to echo in his mind when he had spoken it. But he had settled that.

  “Damn.” She was obviously disappointed. And worried. “Well. Whoever it was, she didn’t sound like she was in any immediate danger. So if it was Helen, I guess she can call home for herself any time she wants to. If it wasn’t … I can’t imagine who it might have been. Or why they’d want to play such a trick.”

  The rest of the ride out to the wealthy suburbs passed for the most part in silence. This evening no one was manning the mansion’s great iron gates. But still the gates were locked.

  “I don’t understand. They knew I was coming out tonight.”

  Half a minute of intermittent horn-blowing at last produced a smallish man, in yardworker’s clothes, hurrying over the lawns from the direction of the tree-screened house.

  “Oh,” Mary said. “It’s Dorlan.” She waved to him through the gate.

  The little man, peering from inside, seemed to know Mary too, though he offered no real greeting. “Didn’t recognize the car,” he mumbled, and set about unlocking the gate and rolling it open by hand.

  “Mr. Dorlan, this is Mr. Thorn, a friend of mine. He just came along to give me a hand with the things.”

  Dorlan, who had not been visible on either of Thorn’s previous visits, nodded grudgingly. “I’ll just ride up to the house with you and let you in.”

  “Let us in?” Mary echoed in an uncertain voice.

  “They’ve all moved out,” replied Dorlan. There was a kind of grim shyness in his manner, and he did not look directly at either of his visitors. He left them momentarily to shut and lock the gate again, after Thorn had driven the Blazer in.

  “Moved out?” Mary asked him blankly when he came back.

  “Me and the Missus are the only ones left. We’re leaving in the morning. The rest of the staff all got paid off. Mr. and Mrs. Seabright are gone to Santa Fe.”

  Thorn made a faint hissing noise, almost a sigh. Otherwise he made no comment. The Blazer rolled along the graveled drive with Dorlan perched in the small rear seat. Mary looked vacantly at the house as it appeared from behind the screens of palms and citrus. The portico was empty. “My things?”

  “Still inside, up in your old room. They told me to get ’em out on the porch before you come, but I ain’t had time.”

  Thorn stopped near the front of the house. Sunset was still lingering in the second floor’s west windows. “The move is permanent?” he asked.

  “Far as I know. They want all their mail forwarded. This place is being closed up. Though I hear Ellison’s the owner now.”

  Mary opened her door and hopped out briskly. “Well, I’m just as glad. I don’t want to look at him again. At any of them.”

  Thorn got out too, followed by Dorlan, who was now looking intently at the taller man, as if fascinated despite himself. Dorlan yawned suddenly. “Damn tired,” he complained. “Worked all day. No friggin’ air conditioning this afternoon. Power’s off in the main house already.”

  “Very tiring,” agreed Thorn. “You will be glad to get to sleep.” He extended a hand, palm up, while Mary watched in growing puzzlement.

  “I’ll say.” Dorlan fumbled a set of keys loose from a chain at his belt, and handed them over. He yawned again, and tottered to the portico, where he leaned against one of its imitation Doric columns. A moment later he sat down. His eyes had closed.

  “Oh dear,” said Mary, and fell silent, forgetting whatever comment she had been about to make. A large mastiff had just appeared at the corner of the house. From her days in residence she remembered the beast as an unpleasant and dangerous watchdog. It was staring at them intently and a low vibration of warning issued from its throat.

  “Quiet,” said Thorn softly. Mary had no doubt that he was talking to her, but instantly the dog’s growling trailed off. It leaned forward, as if about to charge, or topple, in their direction. Then somehow there was a change of plan. The great head, ears askew, turned away from them. The dog sniffed the gathering dusk. Then it turned round twice in place, scratched at an ear, and lay down peacefully.

  A faint snore arose from Dorlan, who sat leaning against his post. Mary looked from one phenomenon to the other, and seemed to be trying to think of some suitable comment. She was evidently unable.

  Keys jingled briskly in Thorn’s fingers. “Come. I should like to see the room you occupied.” He unlocked the great front door and pushed it open, and like some old courtier bowed Mary in ahead of him. She found herself accepting the bow as something perfectly natural.

  The house was filled with what felt like an unnatural heat—it was only the day’s heat that had crept in through fallen defenses, Mary realized, but it felt strange in rooms where she had never known anything but cool comfort. Out of habit she flicked a light switch in the cavernous great hall—nothing happened, of course. But enough daylight remained to see that a start had been made at covering up furniture, getting the place ready for some extended period of inoccupancy.

  With Thorn at her side Mary crossed the great, silent hall, heading away from the study and the elevator, toward the foot of the broad main stairway. But when she reached the stair she stopped. “I haven’t been back here since—that night. Oh, I came back once with the police, re-enacting what I could remember for them. But…”

  “But it all comes back to you much more strongly now.

  “Yes, you’re right, it does.” She shivered.

  “Good. Very good. Shall we go up?”

/>   Mary wanted to protest that it was not very good at all, that she was growing frightened. But she would not be a coward. She would get her property that she had come here for, and then she would leave, if possible before the darkness thickened any further. She started up the shadowed stair. Thorn’s feet, closely following, were inaudibly light.

  As I was going up the stair

  I met a man who wasn’t there …

  How did it go? Something like that, anyway. Actually she was quite glad for his tall, silent presence. It was not this man she feared. She hadn’t realized, or had lately forgotten, that when she lived here she had felt real fear of certain other people in the house. In her imagination she could see Ellison Seabright now at the head of the stairs, as he had been standing on that night, looking down at her … and behind Ellison, another and truly terrifying figure that came and went before Mary knew who it was, and maybe she didn’t want to know … even only in her imagination…

  She half-stumbled near the top of the stairs, and Thorn’s hand came to support her elbow neatly. “Thank you,” Mary murmured. “God, yes, you were right. How it all comes back…”

  “Your bedroom,” said Thorn, interrupting a silent pause, “must have been down this corridor, on the right.”

  “Yes. But how did you know?”

  Thorn was pacing slowly away, not answering. He reached a door and pushed it open, and stood in the hallway inspecting the dim interior thoughtfully.

  “That wasn’t mine.”

  “Delaunay’s.”

  “How could you have known?” She came up beside Thorn; the room he was gazing into was so dark it was impossible to see anything. “Oh, of course, some of the magazines published plans of the whole layout, didn’t they? There was so much publicity. I’m glad that’s finally beginning to be over.”

  “What was Delaunay like?” Thorn was looking into the room as if to read its very shadows.

  “Oh … big. Not quite as big as Ellison, and five years older, but there was a fairly strong resemblance. Physically, I mean, of course, that’s all. Del was a kind old man, shy of publicity. He was always kind to me, anyway. He came here from Australia when he was very young. He still had something Aussie, as he called it, in his speech at times. He and Ellison had the same father, different mothers.”

  “How was the family wealth amassed?”

  “I’m really not sure. Somewhere a couple of generations back, I guess. Del built up the fortune even more during his lifetime. He never seemed to me to be the tycoon type, you know, mean, aggressive, a go-getter. But I guess things could have been different when he was young.” Mary seemed about to add something but then decided against it. Thorn thought that for once her mouth closed prematurely.

  “What?” he prompted.

  “I … well, I shouldn’t say it. But sometimes I wondered about him.”

  “Oh? In what way?”

  “Well … just that I didn’t think he could have been as nice to everyone as he was to me. He was just a little bit too good. Oh, that’s a rotten thing for me to say after he was so generous to me and all. But you know what I mean?”

  Thorn nodded encouragingly. “Perhaps I do.”

  Once over the hump, Mary plunged on. “Look, I’ve known one or two people, in religious orders, who I thought were really saintly. It’s not all that common there, believe me. But there were one or two who I wouldn’t be surprised if they were canonized someday. They were really good. They had a, a kind of joy about them. Well, I never felt like that about Del. He went through all the motions of being very good, with me at least, playing the role of this extremely nice old man. But…” Mary, with a helpless gesture, despaired of saying it just right.

  “But,” supplied Thorn, “he could have been acting.”

  Mary sighed and moved away from Del’s room, going down the corridor, her steps picking up briskness as she went. “It’s wrong of me to talk like that. He really gave me that Verrocchio.”

  “Did he, indeed? Then where is it?”

  But Mary had been distracted. Halfway to her old room, walking the thickly padded, silent carpet, her steps moved irregularly to one side, as if in some involuntary reaction.

  Thorn took her again by the elbow, gently stopping her forward progress. “Where did you find the murdered girl?”

  Mary had backed up against the wall and was staring at the floor just in front of her feet. Now her voice was a mere whisper. “Her legs were stretched out in this direction. Like she had been running, and then was shot from behind, and just fell forward, you know? But she must have been turning her head to look behind her just as she was shot, because her face caught it. The whole front part of her head was … I couldn’t have identified her face, no one could. But otherwise it looked like Helen. She had on a white robe of Helen’s, and there weren’t any other young girls around. At least not as far as I knew.”

  “Annie Chapman?”

  Mary tried to read Thorn’s eyes; he had taken off his sunglasses at last, but the dim light made it hard. She said: “That’s the name that … the girl on the phone mentioned. I swear to you I never heard of any Annie Chapman, not until we got that crazy call. I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember, and the name means nothing. But since then I’ve been thinking…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, maybe Delaunay wasn’t as good, as perfect, as he let on to me. And I know he was involved with trying to help runaways; or he told me he wanted to get involved with it anyway—”

  “What are you trying to say, Mary?”

  “Well. Maybe—ordinarily he’d have told me, or Helen would have told me, if they were giving shelter to some other kid. But maybe, well, maybe he—just had a girl in his room for the night.”

  “I suppose it would not be terribly surprising.” Thorn sounded faintly, fondly amused. “Men of good repute have done even stranger and more wicked things than that.”

  “I know,” Mary agreed uncertainly. She was looking down at the carpet again. “She—the girl, whoever it was—was lying right about here. Somehow they’ve cleaned up all the bloodstains. The white robe she was wearing had fallen open, and I could see she didn’t have anything underneath it. Helen told me once that she had taken to sleeping that way, in the raw, ever since she’d been on the road.”

  “Mary, I would like to hear your story of that night from the beginning. According to the news accounts—were they at all accurate?”

  “Pretty much, I guess.” Mary’s brashness had been fading steadily. Her voice was now almost a child’s.

  “According to them you heard noise, ran from your room, and came upon the dead girl. What happened next?”

  “I—it’s hard for me—”

  “Go back and start again, Mary. You were asleep.”

  The pattern in the carpet before her eyes was being melted by the onrush of night outside the windows, disappearing into darkness. She didn’t want the fixed pattern to go. She held onto it desperately, resisting the voice of Thorn.

  “I want you to go back and start again, Mary. Go back—”

  In sudden fear, Mary turned toward him. Her hands folded themselves like the hands of a woman praying, or diving into deep water, and in a moment she had completed a soft lunging motion that brought her face into secure hiding against his chest. “Hold me,” she murmured.

  His hands held her, and they were warm. But his voice was inexorable. “Go back. You were asleep.”

  I can’t do it. Her protest was silent, but vehement as any shout, and she knew that it was heard.

  “I will help you. You are under my protection now. I would not ask it if it were not important. Will you not help me to find out the truth about Helen?”

  Mary dared not open her eyes. If she looked up her eyes might meet his.

  “Go through it all. Once more, with my help, through it all, and that will make an end to it. An end to the bad dreams that now plague you almost every night.”

  Surprise tricked Mary into looking up. “How
did you know that?”

  His eyes were hard to see. But it was hard to look away from them again.

  “No,” Mary said once more. But she knew that the force of her protest was failing.

  * * *

  Mary was sleeping, something she still did most comfortably and deeply in her old nun-pajamas. And even as she slept it seemed to her (though with some fitfully active portion of her mind she simultaneously knew better) that Thorn was unreal, that his talk in the dark mansion with her was nothing but a fading dream. A dream from which she would presently awake, to find herself in her own sunlit room, the bedroom next to Helen’s. When Mary awoke it would be cheerful morning, and she would be surrounded and defended by all the safe wealth of the Seabright house…

  …and into her sleep there tore a fist of shotgun noise. The roar slammed against her bedroom door from the outside, jarring Mary instantly awake. Her eyes flew open to register dark midnight, only accented by the pale dial of the bedside clock.

  Whatever that slam of sound had been, it must mean that something was terribly wrong. Adrenalin propelled Mary out of bed, grabbing in reflex for the red robe that lay as usual over a nearby chair. One arm in a sleeve of the robe, struggling to sleeve the other, she flung open her bedroom door and ran out into the hallway. Here the darkness was less intense; as usual some muted illumination was coming in through the hall windows from the security lights that ringed the exterior of the house. Somewhere out there now the mastiff, and another watchdog, were raging futilely.

  A few steps down the hall, a white bundle lay on the floor. Mary ran to it, and stopped when one of her bare toes touched warm stickiness on the carpet.

  Vaguely she was aware of sniffing the unfamiliar stink of burnt explosive. She could see the white thing on the floor quite plainly now, but in a state of new shock she was still trying to make sense of the world in which this white murdered thing could have existence. There were urgent human voices, not far away, saying—Mary could not quite make out what. She hardly raised her eyes. She still had not moved when vague figures walking the darkness, two coming from her right, one from her left, closed in to bracket her. A ski-masked man standing at her left was pointing a long-barreled firearm of some kind right at her midsection. Mary’s belly shrank toward her backbone.