Dominion

by Fred Saberhagen

  Again there drifted muffled sound from somewhere. These were faint, but Margie got the impression that there was something spasmodic and desperate about them. Probably someone just horsing around. Or wrestling with some heavy furniture. Of course it could be people really fighting, dead serious about it. Even as Marge paused to listen, the noise ceased. She waited a little, but could hear nothing more, and moved along again. She wanted to get down to the lower passage, which she recalled was a little wider and ought to offer a more comfortable place to wait in.

  It still didn’t really make sense, she thought, that Si knew about all these secret ways and peepholes, and the people who lived here didn’t. She wondered why he had seemed so shaken today, at a couple of places while they were climbing the hill through the woods. He’d said that someday he’d tell Margie the whole story, about his growing up in these parts; which meant, if Marge understood Simon as well as she thought she was beginning to understand him, that he would never tell her any more. Simon wasn’t a bad guy, and Marge liked working with him. He was all professionalism, as a rule, when it came to the act. As for the love life, well, he wouldn’t be her first choice for that. There was always the feeling that he was really thinking about something or someone else.

  Marge was passing another peephole, and without much of a struggle she yielded to the temptation to pause and take a look. Another bedroom, with a suitcase on the floor. The spyhole gave a perfect view of the bed, which had two people sitting on it. A grossly heavy, swarthy man, just sitting there, turned so Marge couldn’t see his face, half dressed. Another half-dressed figure, facing the other way, a body so thin that Marge wasn’t sure for a moment that it was female, staring into space. Almost immediately Marge turned away. Ugh. There had been a wrongness in that room. She felt as if she had just spied on people laboriously inventing some new perversion. They looked as if they might have just finished such a task.

  Now, if and when the secret passageway became general knowledge during the weekend, that couple, all the guests, would wonder who might have watched them doing what. Ugh. Complications.

  Marge moved on, for the sake of silence scraping the walls as little as possible. She traversed what was left of the upper passage and then went down the long, steep stairs, using her light. When at last she reached the peephole giving a view of the great hall, nothing had changed. The great logs still crackled in the enormous fireplace, the aroma made Marge hungry. In her shoulder bag were a couple of candy bars that she meant to eat later. Anyway she certainly wasn’t just going to camp in this spot waiting for Simon to appear. He’d need an hour, at the very least, to get back across the river and then drive round, by way of the bridge at Blackhawk, to approach the castle by road in the manner of an ordinary guest.

  Using her flashlight sparingly, keeping its beam aimed low, Marge went on down, following the tunnel underground. A minute more, and she had passed the branching way—without giving it much thought—and was back in the cave, peering out into the now-gloomy daylight of the deserted grotto and its paved forecourt with the statues and the curious stone table. The fact that a cloud had come over the sun made the whole place now look somehow ominous. But, reassuringly, it was as quiet and uninhabited as ever. The jail-door was closed and bound with the chain and lock—Simon on going out must have been careful to leave it exactly as before, which was only what you would expect from someone as meticulously professional about details as he was. Now Marge ought to be able to do the same thing with the gate, and just slip out for a minute into these deserted woods…

  It took a little more than a minute, maybe two or three. Then she was back inside the cave again, physically relieved and ready to concentrate properly on the job at hand. She carefully bound up the chain and lock just as before, and retreated into the underground portion of the passage. The next step, she had decided, would be to get a little rest. She would find a relatively dustfree place and stretch out, maybe catch a little nap. Marge knew her own habits; the danger that she was going to oversleep was just about zero.

  Within a few minutes Marge was dozing on the tunnel floor, shoulder bag serving as a pillow. When she awoke it was with a start, and the feeling of having been asleep for some time. At first she had no faintest idea of where she was or how she’d got here.

  Memory returned, bringing with it reassurance of a sort. The gloom in the tunnel was much thicker than it had been when Marge dozed off; darkness had obviously fallen outside. She had a bad moment, wondering if after all she could have overslept. But no, her watch showed it to be only a little before seven. Some shadow must have come over the inlets for air and light. Perfect timing, she thought, or close to perfect. They had decided dinner probably wouldn’t start till eight, and the show would go on after dinner.

  Marge rose without haste and stretched. Then she picked up her bag and hurried along to the agreed-upon primary rendezvous, the peephole giving into the great hall. She braced herself in a standing position at the lookout, watching and waiting for Simon to appear.

  Her wait was short, so short that she again sent up a silent cheer for perfect timing. Here came Simon from another room, alone, wearing his swim trunks now and carrying still-dry towel. The expression on his face told Margie of controlled worry, concern deeper than the usual pre-performance tenseness. Maybe, she thought guiltily, Si had been here at the rendezvous before, trying to signal her about some problem.

  He gave the primary signal now, brushing at his hair, and Marge felt another twinge of guilt to see his relief when she answered at once with the flashlight, signaling that she was in place and everything was fine. And then Marge could feel relieved, for Si signaled to her nothing about difficulty or cancellation; he only paused for a moment, looking up at something above Marge’s head and out of her range of vision, and then he walked on out of the great hall, doubtless to have his swim. She thought it must be something other than the performance itself that was worrying him. Maybe he’d been told that the fee wasn’t going to be a full thousand after all.

  Anyway she could now relax again for a little while. Things were rolling, the act could go smoothly, just the way they wanted it. They might even pull off a really spectacular effect. Marge could imagine how it would be for the audience, a roomful of people absolutely certain that they were facing solid stone walls, when a voice spoke to them out of nowhere, and then in response to a magician’s gesture the figure of a young woman took shape out of thin air…

  It wasn’t too early now for her to get her costume on. She slipped it out of the handbag and inspected it as well as she could in the poor light. Diaphanous was the word. She had debated with herself about how much to wear underneath it, and was glad now that she’d decided a full leotard wasn’t too much. She had the leotard on now under her shirt and jeans, and a good thing too, if that fat man she’d just been spying on upstairs was going to be in the audience, as he undoubtedly was. Something about him made Marge shudder inwardly, and she hadn’t even seen his face.

  She exchanged her white gym shoes for black ballet slippers for the performance; not that it was unlikely that anyone would be studying her feet very closely.

  She had just finished changing, except for her shoes, and had got the street clothing crammed into the handbag, when new distraction came, in the form of what sounded like a groan. It was a faint sound, yet gave the impression of coming from somewhere uncomfortably close. There couldn’t, thought Marge, there absolutely couldn’t be anyone else in this unknown passage with her. And yet it certainly sounded like it.

  Another faint groan wavered in the air, again too close for comfort, too close to be ignored. Was Margie herself now to be the target for some kind of trick?

  That was one of the first thoughts that leapt into her mind. She had to know. Penlight in hand, Marge prowled the tunnel. Not that way, this way. The moaning sound obligingly repeated at irregular short intervals. She was led to the branch passage going down, but paused at its top step. She had assumed, when Simon ignored the bra
nch, that he knew where it led and that it could be disregarded.

  Now that she looked carefully, she could see one set of footprints in the dust of the stairs before her. It was hard to tell if the faint prints were going up or down.

  She sat her shoulder bag down carefully on the floor, leaving herself freer for quick action, and tiptoed down the stairs, stepping in the tracks. She came to a thick wooden door, standing slightly open. The groans emanating from its other side. When she snapped off her tiny flashlight she could see faint torchlight flickering through the opening around the door.

  Marge stood still, thinking. She didn’t need to think for very long. Groans and an open door, whatever else they might mean, indicated that other people besides herself and Simon had to be aware of the supposedly secret passage. They meant, at the very least, that the whole elaborately planned trick had to be considered blown. They meant—

  She had to find out what they meant. It was impossible to do anything else until she knew.

  The door swung back easily, with only the faintest squeaking of its antique-looking hinges. What lay beyond it resolved no questions for Marge, but only raised them to a new level.

  In her short life she had seen a lot of acts, good ones and bad ones, from inside and out. She could tell at first glance that the semiconscious old man bound to the torture rack was no willing participant of any act. His arms and legs were almost plump, his ribs scrawny. His head, shaggy with gray hair and beard, rolled slowly from side to side. His eyes were closed. His mouth, open to reveal bad teeth, drooled a little from one corner.

  Marge approached. She prodded the old man gently with a finger in the ribs. The only response was another groan. Then she reached to loosen the leather strap binding the old man’s left wrist; it looked so tight that she was sure it must be hurting him. The buckle, of an odd design, and very stiff, resisted her first efforts. Margie’s fingernails were of a practical short length, but she was afraid for a moment that she’d broken one, maybe because all of a sudden her hands had started to shake. The strap came loose at last. The old man’s pinched wrist was relieved, but his arm stayed where it was; he wasn’t going to wake up.

  That’s it, then,” said Marge to herself, aloud and decisively. At that moment she completely abandoned all thoughts of being able to go on with the performance as planned. This old man was real, and really hurting. She had to reveal her presence and get help.

  As Marge turned away from the rack, the idea had just begun to form in her mind that Simon might be in some kind of serious trouble too, and for that matter herself as well. If the people in charge of this castle were people who did things like this—

  The thought had no time to develop. A muscular young black man wearing a dark shirt was standing in a second doorway to the room, looking at Marge. It was a recessed doorway that she had not noticed until this moment. The man’s skin was the color of creamed coffee, and his face was handsome in a way that struck Marge at first glance as somehow, indefinably, flawed. And he was looking every bit as surprised as Margie felt. It wasn’t the old man tied on the rack that had surprised him, though. It was Marge.

  “How in hell many of you are there?” he murmured in a soft voice. The question seemed not to need an answer; in the next moment he took a step toward her.

  Marge, who had just begun a protest speech, cut it off and instinctively stepped back. Whatever it was about the man facing her, posture, movement, look, she was warned. On nimble feet she got the only large obstacle in the room, the rack with its still-groaning occupant, between herself and the advancing man.

  With the rack between them, she gazed at the black man, and he at her. The dim light in the room flickered, the torch guttering on the wall.

  “I’m asking you, who else is in here, woman?” The man had paused in his advance. He swung a quick look around him now, at the door to the once-secret tunnel standing wide open, then at once back to Marge.

  Marge couldn’t answer. She wouldn’t have been able to speak, even if she’d had words ready; there seemed to be something wrong with her throat. She was pretty well boxed-in behind the rack, with little room to maneuver. The stone wall touched her back.

  “Come here.” The man moved toward her slowly. His eyes were unblinking, and in them grew a frightening happiness. Then he smiled lightly, as if at the foolishness of simply telling her to come to him.

  His strong-looking arms were half extended, fingers curved for a quick grab.

  “No.”

  “Oh yeah. Oh yeah, lady. Here to me.”

  If the man lunged straight across the rack he would be able to grab her. And now he did lunge, with unexpected, cobraish speed. He had Marge by the wrist, trying to pull her toward him.

  Marge had wiry strength, and desperation. They struggled together for a moment like obscene actors, across the old man’s naked torso. Then something happened, Marge couldn’t tell what, but the crushing grip on her arm was suddenly broken. Her assailant made a strange sound, slumping back, sliding down to one knee.

  Gasping as if she had been knifed, Marge scraped herself out from behind the constricting rack and ran for the tunnel door. Wherever the other door might lead, her attacker had come from there, it was his turf, there might be more of him that way. Her one thought was to reach the open air and daylight. Once out in the tunnel she climbed the stairs in a mad all-fours scramble that brought her back to the main passage. Then she turned to her right and ran, gambling that she could run in this thick gloom without disaster, rather than delay the fraction of a second needed to get the flashlight from her costume’s pocket.

  Daylight had all but disappeared when Marge reached the cave mouth. In her terror she saw this fact as another phase of an attack aimed at her. Sobbing, she threw herself down at the base of the barred gate that held her in the cave, fumbling in a mad panic to loosen again the padlock and the chain. With every second stretched in terror she heard imagined footfalls of pursuit. And yet no horror arrived to seize her from behind. Somehow the lock did open in her fingers; the chain rattled through them, tearing at her skin.

  Marge burst the freed door clanging open and ran out. A few heavy, preliminary drops of rain were striking on the paved court, on the stone table with its obscure sundial. A statue gaped in her path, glaring at her with dead gray eyes; she ran around it. The heat of the day had dissipated now in the damp hush before the storm; the shadow of the castle lay enormous on the woods around her now. She scraped her shin, uncaring, on the low stone fence that rimmed the courtyard from the woods. Tree branches hanging

  motionless in gloom scraped at her as she fled. The path was not really visible now, but here there was only one level route a path could take. Marge sped along it gasping, the branches that clawed at her threatening to turn into apparitions.

  Even with the forest altered by dusk the intersection of paths was unmistakable. She turned downhill, running without pause. In what seemed nightmare slowness the switchback curves of the descending path flowed past her. It was now so dark that she was sure the sun was down. A single raindrop struck her cheek. Through gaps in the trees, by the light of an odd sky, she saw clouds coursing thick and low, like airborne giants hunting across the valley of the Sauk.

  The ugly realization overtook Margie as she ran: there would be no boat waiting at the landing below. Simon would already have taken it back across the river.

  Then she would plunge into the water, swim, wade, do whatever she had to do to get away. At least, thank God, no one was chasing her.

  And then she heard, from up the hill behind her, that someone was. Or something. Not even human feet. In a moment the sound identified itself to her fear as a pounding, four-legged run, as of some monstrous dog.

  Terror compounded, escalating into something approaching madness. Just as Marge rounded the last steep descending turn of path, exhausted muscles failed and her foot slipped, the ankle starting to twist. She came down heavily, in rough grass and weeds. With superhuman speed her pursuer was cat
ching up. The sound of onrushing feet was mixed now with a hideous growling and snuffling, the noises of a menacing dog amplified to the proportions of a bear.

  Marge screamed, her mind gone in blind panic. Just as she lunged to regain her feet, a shaggy, stinking shape loomed over her. What felt like a furred muzzle struck her on the cheek, hard enough to knock her down again. She had a moment’s glimpse of literally glowing eyes, and monstrous fangs.

  Marge screamed again, a hopeless quavering. The pressure of a paw at her throat kept her down on her back. At last with pure relief she heard the running arrival of a pair of human feet, she cared not whose.

  The black man’s soft voice, panting, was hot with anger now. “You got her. Good.” It sounded as if he were speaking to another person, not a beast. Then his tone shifted, purring at Marge: “One more yell, and he’ll take a chunk out of you where you won’t like it. Believe me?”

  “Yes,” said Marge. And the animal, as if her answer had satisfied it, at once removed its pinning weight.

  “Get up,” the man said.

  Marge got up, very slowly, surprised to find herself practically unhurt. What had been a gauzy costume was little more than trailing rags. She and the man were both still gasping from the downhill run. Meanwhile the impossible beast—Marge couldn’t convince herself it was only a dog—sat on its haunches staring at her. Its black fur was long and so was its lolling pink tongue. There was something thickly, horribly human about that tongue. In its sitting position the beast was almost tall enough to look Margie in the eye.

  “Now don’t run,” the man advised her, getting his breathing under control. “Don’t do anything now but what I say. Just walk back up the path. That way you stay alive.”

  Surely, thought Marge, before she had climbed as far as the castle again, she could somehow manage to wake up. No nightmare went on indefinitely. And at the same time she knew better. Across the river, its sound carrying freely over the broad water, a diesel semi was taking the narrow highway at high speed. Its headlights might as well have been shining somewhere on Mars.