Dominion

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Pass me the tool kit, Marge.” Escape work, opening locks, was not his strongest act. But he had dabbled.

  Margie dug into her shoulder bag and pulled out the packet of folded cloth, the size of a billfold. It opened to show pockets filled with a jeweler’s or an escape artist’s, selection of instruments. Simon selected a small pick and went to work. The lock didn’t look terribly expensive or difficult.

  Meanwhile Margie retreated to stand just inside the mouth of the grotto, on watch, looking out and listening. Once she turned to ask him in a whisper: “Did you hear something?”

  He paused, ready to be irritated at the interruption, but still believing that she would not have interrupted him for any commonplace sound. He listened, but could hear nothing out of the ordinary. “Maybe a bird?” he suggested. “Some animal in the woods?”

  Margie shrugged. Simon went back to work. The cheap lock gave up after only a couple of minutes, unrusted parts of its shackle sliding into view. With a mutter of triumph he undid the chain and set it down; and now, with a minimum of skreeking, the jail door could be swung open. A few spider webs tore soundlessly. Inside lay blown dust and dead leaves, untrodden.

  When Margie had got herself wedged into the cave mouth with him, he closed the door again behind them both, and re-wrapped the chain as convincingly as possible. He secured its links with the lock, which he almost closed. “Now,” he said.

  Margie had already repacked the tool kit, and now had a tiny flashlight ready. With this in hand Simon led the way into the cave. It was a way along which progress at first looked hopeless; it seemed that you must run into a wall before you had gone more than the length of your body. But around the first corner the light already shone into deep blackness, showing where a small natural crevice had been carved wider. Simon went down on all fours and inched and scraped his way ahead, with Marge groping at his, heels. He slid down, deeper into the hillside. A moment later they could both stand up.

  “Wow,” whispered Margie. “I’m starting to believe your story.”

  The passage was too narrow for more than one person at a time, but adequately high. From here it snaked slowly upward through the hill, presumably following some path of least resistance through the rock. It darkened briefly to almost pitch blackness, then brightened again somewhat as they approached the outlet of an air-and-light shaft that pierced the solid stone roof ahead. The outlet of the vent at or above ground level was obviously very well concealed in some way; Simon had never had an opportunity to try to learn where or how. The last time he’d come this way, he hadn’t had a flashlight with him; he could recall groping and stumbling; and he told himself now that those memories at least had to be real enough.

  The secret way did not continue underground for very long. After fifteen yards or so, and one more small vent for light and air, they reached a steep, short flight of stairs, cut out of the native limestone just like the rest of the passage. Then, when they had climbed about ten steps, walls and stair alike became construction instead of carving. The passage had brought them up within the main castle walls themselves, twelve feet in thickness at the base.

  Here the way was as narrow as before, and still quite dim. The air was fresh-smelling, but considerably cooler than outdoors. Unexpectedly, a branching passage appeared, twisting away to one side and again downward; Simon remembered the branch but hadn’t explored it before, and wasn’t going to check it out just now; maybe a little later, if everything else went well.

  Another stair. At its top, natural light, dim but adequate for movement, was coming in through one side of the passage. Simon flicked off the penlight and gestured Margie to silence. At the top of the stair they stood together, looking out. On this side of the passage a deep niche built into the stone wall terminated in an actual window, covered with a thick wood screen through which only a few small holes remained open. Heads side by side in the recess, they each put eye to hole and found themselves looking out into what Simon remembered as the great hall of the castle. It was certainly a vast chamber, whose size was difficult to estimate in this constricted view; but from this strategically placed spyhole almost all of it was visible. In the enormous fireplace a huge spit turned, and the smell of roasting meat confirmed that some sizable animal was indeed being roasted whole. A long, crude trestle table, the chief article of furniture, was dwarfed by the size of the room around it. At the moment no people were in sight; the spit was being turned electrically, a cord from a small motor running to an outlet in the gray stone wall, as incongruous as it was inconspicuous.

  Simon turned his head, putting lips to Margie’s ear. “This panel should open from in here if you push it. This is where you’ll come out. Think you can squeeze through?”

  She pulled back, looked at the dimensions of the window in the stone. “A little tight. I can manage, though, if it doesn’t tear the damn gauzy costume off. How far down is the floor out there?”

  Simon looked again, estimated. “I think just about the same as the surface we’re standing on in here. I’ll look it over from the other side, tonight, before I give you the final signal at dinner. Okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll give it my best shot.”

  “Good guy,” said Simon, and kissed her gently on one ear. Marge had fits of women’s lib of varying intensity, and being called girl sometimes caused an argument.

  “If this works, you’ll be a good guy yourself. If it doesn’t…”

  “We’ve got an upper level to check out,” Simon whispered. Flicking on the penlight again, he led her to and up another flight of stairs. This was steep and went up a long way. At the top of this the passage, now so narrow that even Marge scraped both sides as she passed, ran level for a considerable distance. At intervals of a few yards more niches were built into the wall, on the same side, again with spots of indirect light filtering through them. These spy windows were quite low down in the wall, and each of them gave into a separate bedroom, four or five in all. Peering into one of these rooms after another, Simon and Marge found them empty of people but all furnished and apparently ready for use. The passage they were in still followed the outer wall of the castle, and the windows in the bedrooms were under their feet. In a couple of the rooms luggage had already been deposited.

  At the spyhole to the last bedroom, Simon indicated a division in the section of paneling that showed through the stone window. “Give a push here and it should swing open, if for any reason you have to get out this way.” It was always good to have some kind of fall-back plan.

  “Like looking for the ladies’ room, maybe. It’s only about two o’clock now—I could be in here another six hours or so, and then have to go right into the act.”

  “I guess I didn’t think…”

  “I’ll cope. I’m resourceful.”

  “Sure you will.” Simon kissed her, quickly but with real affection. They had been working together and occasionally sleeping together for a year now, and sometimes he thought that something permanent had grown between them and then again he didn’t know. He turned away, then back. “Here, you’ll need the flashlight. Almost forgot.”

  “Can you grope your way out?”

  “No problem.” And he was on his way; in moments at the top of the uppermost stair, down which he felt his way on his soft-soled shoes.

  The first part of the trip out was uneventful. It was as if every foot of the way had already been engraved upon his memory. But when he had got as far as the branching tunnel in the base of the wall he was surprised to see that light was filtering upward very faintly from the branch. Probably just the penlight in his hand had been enough to mask it when they were on the way up. Simon paused, watching. The light was possessed by a tiny flicker, as if its source were flame. Before he left Margie alone in the tunnel system, he ought to check this out.

  Down a short turning stair in the branch tunnel, and he came to what surprised him, a real door. It was made of crude wood that seemed to fit with the rest of the decor, and was swung partly ajar, out
into a sizable stone room with stone-flagged floor. In the room a torch in a wrought-iron wall sconce burned dimly, making the illumination that had drawn Simon here. Against the wall not far from the torch there stood on two legs a metal object that Simon at first took for a suit of armor. It took him a few moments’ staring in the dim light to realize that it was some kind of iron maiden, a complex instrument of torture.

  At best the old man had had a bizarre sense of humor. Whatever this sub-basement was being used for now, the open door, the torch, meant that it was certainly being used for something, and that what Simon had thought were the secret passageways were known. He would have to go back and get Margie and get out. But first he was going to try to find out exactly what…

  When he peered cautiously round the edge of the door, the whole room, or almost all of it, was visible. Besides the iron maiden, other peculiar instruments stood about in it. Most notably a bed-like rack, with great spoked wheels made to give leverage for disjointing the victim’s limbs. And the rack was occupied…

  Simon stepped back, closed eyes and rubbed them, mumbled something halfway between a prayer and a curse, then stepped forward and looked again. The rack was occupied by the naked body of an old man, gray-whiskered, paunchy, whose wrists and ankles were bound to the machine by the provided heavy straps, and who looked as if he were not dead but certainly unconscious.

  Moving without conscious volition, Simon pushed the door open farther and stepped out into the room. Eyes fixed on the rack and its’ occupant, he moved forward slowly. He’d been working up to an hallucination like this one all afternoon, and now it was here, and he was almost glad, knowing that it couldn’t possibly be real.

  The old man was quite motionless except for gentle, faintly snoring breathing. A small rope of saliva trailed from one corner of his mouth. The leather strap holding one of his arms felt like a taut strap when Simon touched it, and the old man’s forearm, puffed slightly by the tight bond, certainly felt like flesh. But this couldn’t be—

  Simon started to take a step backward, and without warning a strangling grip clamped on him from behind. His neck was caught, one arm pinioned. He could no longer breathe and his head was going to burst and he knew that in a moment more he would be dead.

  SIX

  In Chicago pawnshops they had looked at enough samurai swords, at least imitation ones, to have conquered China; enough Nazi bayonets, most of which Joe Keogh thought had never been farther east than Gary or anyway New England, to have repelled the Russians. With Charley Snider he had seen bolos, Bowie knives, trench knives, stilettos, sabers, machetes, and cutlasses. They had confiscated illegal switchblades, that no claim of being a bona fide collector could save. They had looked at razors and cleavers and spearheads and God knew what, had handled today every variety of pigsticker that either Joe or Charley had ever heard of, in the process coming upon a few types that were new to both of them. And they had failed to find, or at least failed to identify, what they were looking for. Of course two men, or ten men, could not have covered all the pawnshops in a single day, and there was tomorrow to look forward to. Right now the men were deep in the basement of central headquarters, rummaging with fading hope through the last few days’ take of confiscated goodies. Along with enough blades to furnish a field of grass, there were blackjacks here, zip guns, and, once more, God knew what.

  Charley was squinting doubtfully at an odd kind of homemade brass knuckle outfit. A small length of chain had been riveted onto it. Charley had been detailed to work full time with Joe today because of a report that a black man exactly fitting the description of Carados, the west coast murderer, had been seen in conversation with a bum known as Feathers in a tavern just a block off Skid Row; and Feathers was now nowhere to be found; and Joe had allowed it to be known informally that his informant might just possibly be able to provide some lead.

  “I guess,” said Charley, trying the quaint artifact on his right fist, “if you don’t get ’im with the punch you maybe take an eye out with the swinging end.”

  “I guess,” agreed Joe. With a faint groan he straightened up from the table full of treasures he had been turning over; when he got home to Kate he was going to request a backrub.

  “So now,” Charley sighed, “looks like you can tell your boy when he calls again that we came up empty trying to find this special blade he talkin’ ’bout. What exactly was this cutter supposed to tell us when we did find it?”

  During the day’s labors Joe had already managed to put off this question a couple of times. Of course it would have to be answered sooner or later, and he had been giving some thought to how. He tried now the best answer he had so far been able to come up with: “If we found it, and could describe it exactly to him—add details beyond what he already knows about it—then he thought it would help him, maybe, to put his finger on the guys we want.” Joe had to admit to himself that his best answer sounded purely terrible.

  Charley took his time considering. “Well,” he said at last, “I guess this cat has really come through for you a time or two in the past.”

  “Yeah. He has.”

  “For Carados,” said Charley, “I’ll go to a lot of trouble. I’ll even take a chance on making an utter damn fool of myself and wasting a lot of time. When’s your guy supposed to call you again?”

  “Tonight, I hope. He wasn’t sure.” Last night, when Talisman had called Joe at home, to give him the first detailed information about the sword, Joe had been able to hear the subway trains roaring in the background. And it had been midnight. Joe wouldn’t have cared to hang around a subway station at that hour, not without Charley Snider and maybe a small squad of marines.

  His caller of course had not been distracted by any personal concerns. After describing the sword he was trying to find, Talisman had told Joe of the existence of an imported castle, a European building reconstructed out on the Sauk River, that really ought to be investigated. “The man I began by looking for is there, you see, as well as the truly remarkable man of whom I spoke.”

  “The oddity.”

  “Yes. And I can sense now that there is a woman to match.” For a moment Talisman’s voice seemed to hold nothing but deep masculine appreciation.

  Joe protested. “The Sauk River’s really way out of my territory, as you know. If I call the sheriff out there, or the state police, I can’t just tell them to look for a vampire.”

  “Obviously, Joe. It is possible that a man named Carados, from New Orleans, is there also. His existence they believe in, his possible presence will greatly interest them. But say nothing yet. The time is not yet ripe. More important matters than I had dreamed are involved here.”

  “Why are you telling me now, then?”

  “Someone besides myself should know, Joseph. If I should disappear, if I should die. I am going to visit that castle presently. The duty I have assumed compels me to. But the powers of evil there are greater than I knew, and it may be that they will slay me.”

  SEVEN

  When you had just been strangled to death it seemed not surprising that your next experience should be a peculiar dream. But even under the circumstances this was starting out to be a very peculiar dream indeed. One moment Simon was nonexistent in nothingness, and the next he was adrift on the Sauk in an old rowboat, very like a boat he had sometimes played in during the summers of his childhood, when his grandmother with whom he usually lived in Chicago brought him out to visit his aunt and uncle who ran the antique shop, and the assorted cousins living in Frenchman’s Bend and on some of the farms around.

  In this dream—he was almost sure it was a dream—Simon was a child again, or not much more than a child. He was wearing green swimming trunks, like a pair he had once worn. It was summer, and the rowboat that bore him was adrift, oarless, among the islands of the Sauk. The lack of oars was nothing to worry about. Whenever he wanted to get back to shore he could stick his feet out over the stern and splash hard enough to propel the boat, even straight against the sluggis
h current.

  For a short while Simon was convinced that he was indeed a child again. Then he looked down at his body, and thought about himself, and came to understand that he was fifteen now. He was waiting for Vivian. That realization frightened him, but the fear was swallowed up in the idea’s overwhelming fascination.

  He was expecting her to appear somewhere in the distance first, but instead she burst up with a violent, surprising splash from the brown water right beside his boat, something she had never done in real life, and Simon understood that she must have come swimming underwater for a long distance just to startle him. The effort succeeded; he jumped. Vivian, with green weeds as from the ocean tangled in her dark curly hair, clung to the gunwale looking at him wickedly.

  “I am the lady—” she began, and then pantomimed biting her tongue, acting broadly the part of one who has started to say something that must not be revealed. She was unchanged, no older than when Simon had seen her last, except that her eyes now danced more openly with evil. With a single lithe splashing movement she now pulled herself completely up into the boat. There was a sound as of a faint creaking of bedsprings. At once Simon was compelled to stare at her body, which was clothed in nothing but a very small green bikini. Wetness gleamed on her tanned skin, and he gazed at her helplessly and Vivian smiled knowingly to see the effect that she was having on him.