Thorn

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Hi, young feller, you going up to Santa Fe?”

  Something about the name sounded reasonable. “Yeah,” said Pat, and climbed in on the right. Santa Fe was one of those towns whose name everyone had heard, but he had never seen the place before. Right now, though, it sounded congruent with Annie.

  The car was rolling, easing cautiously off the shoulder onto pavement, picking up speed. The man asked: “You got some family up there?”

  Pat not-answered, as he often did. Looking out the window, he pretended that he hadn’t heard. The man cleared his throat but did not repeat the question. Later on he would. A small roadside sign announced that they were entering an Indian reservation. God, what could even Indians do on land as barren as this? Raise sheep? But there were none in sight.

  You could make movies, of course, you could do that just about anywhere. Pat visualized a line of Indian dancers a thousand strong, their line stretching away over the yellow-brown plain. Make it ten thousand, the line would still look small. A camera in a low-flying aircraft, skimming just above their heads … tell them to show no expression on their faces…

  The Pinto sped in scanty traffic. They kept topping long brown hills, one after another. Annie was getting close. In the distance, on every side now, more mountains reared. Somehow the highway had shrunk, it seemed too narrow here to be called an Interstate. Pat hadn’t been watching the signs. The man, after his first attempt to talk, was unexpectedly going to be silent. Who knew what went on inside people’s heads? No one did. No one. It was all right, silence was okay with Pat.

  After they had driven for the better part of an hour through virtual nothingness they topped a final long hill. Now, miles ahead, some kind of a town or city came into view, looking as if it had been dropped at the foot of the tallest-looking mountains around. Their peaks still showed white that Pat supposed was snow.

  The man cleared his throat again. “Where-abouts can I let you off?”

  Pat brought his gaze back into the car, shifted his position in the seat. Annie was near. “Somewhere around the center of town is fine. If you’re going that way.”

  “The Plaza?”

  Pat didn’t know what The Plaza meant. “That’s fine. Anywhere around there is fine.”

  The man stopped the Pinto twenty minutes later to let Pat out in the midst of a minor traffic jam in narrow streets. Slanting afternoon sunlight warmed low buildings covered with what Pat would have called beige stucco; they put him vaguely in mind of pictures that he had seen of Indian cliff dwellings. And here were some Indians, real-by-God Indians, with their blankets spread on a roofed sidewalk to display pots and jewelry for sale. Above their heads the rough ends of unfinished logs stuck out of the edge of the building’s roof.

  “Thanks for the ride.” Pat flashed a merry smile as he got out. He always liked to do that, no matter what. Maybe he hoped that the people would remember him.

  The man huffily not-answered as he drove away.

  Annie was somewhere around here. That way. Within walking distance now, or almost. Pat started walking.

  * * *

  On the rear patio of his huge house near the northern edge of Santa Fe, Ellison Seabright was trying to get his wife posed properly to paint before the light changed any more. They were out on the rear patio, overlooking a spectacular scene of what was almost wilderness. Only a few other houses were visible, around the edges. Ellison had given Stephanie a supposedly genuine seventeenth-century Spanish shawl to put around her while she perched on the low stone balustrade that rimmed the patio. Just behind his subject, a slope of sandy earth and sparse wild grass, punctuated with dwarfish juniper, fell unfenced and almost untrodden for a hundred yards to end in the bottom of a sinuous ravine. Somewhere down there was an unmarked line where Sea-bright land ended and national forest land began.

  Beginning right with the steep opposing slope of the wild ravine, the Sangre de Cristos mounted to the north and east, claiming the sky in one great rounded step above another. The highest and most distant shoulder of the mountain, blue-clad in distant fir and pine, hid behind it the bald snowcapped peaks projecting upward beyond timberline. Almost all the land in view was government land, unsettled and unpeopled. The mountains went up a mile or more in altitude above the seven thousand feet or so of the patio; a thousand years, Ellison thought, or maybe more than a thousand, back in time.

  Ellison vaguely enjoyed thinking about the mountains, and liked knowing that they were there as a subject for his own painting, whenever he got around to it. He seemed to be chronically pressed for time, and rarely felt he could take time out from business to pick up a brush himself. But today, at last, he had Stephanie at home with him. And a few hours without people or business to interfere.

  Stephanie, sitting on the balustrade, had at last got the shawl arranged to Ellison’s satisfaction. She smiled into the lowering sun, as if she enjoyed its warmth.

  “You’re in a cheerful mood today,” Ellison commented, getting some paints out of the box.

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” Her voice was lighter and easier than he had heard it in some time.

  “No reason. You’re basically a lucky lady.” Except for Helen, of course, a few months back—but if Stephanie could start to forget that now, Ellison wasn’t going to remind her. “But last week in Phoenix you were worried about the sun, how it aged the skin and brought on wrinkles. You said you weren’t going to pose for me any more, out in the sun.”

  “The sun here isn’t as hot.”

  “And you’ve stopped imagining you have wrinkles, I hope.”

  “I don’t intend to get them. I know you divorce your wives when that happens, and look for someone younger. You’ve done it twice before.”

  Ellison looked at her. She gave him back a smile, enigmatic, Mona Lisa. “Shall I cross my legs?”

  “No,” he said, pretending patience, wondering what was going on. “We have the pose all settled. Let’s just concentrate on keeping it.” A change in his wife lately, sure enough; he had thought it was only Helen’s death, but it was more. Ellison squinted about the huge patio, all winey sunlight and bluish shadow, with more furniture than a small house. He was looking for his tube of titanium dioxide white. “Do you realize,” he asked, “that’s it’s now been almost four years since you have posed for me?”

  “Really? That long?”

  “Since shortly after we were married.”

  “Surely it hasn’t been that long.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember that Helen was hardly more than a little girl. She kept sneaking around to see what we were up to in those days I generally had you posing in the nude.”

  The mention of Helen seemed to have had no effect. Something else was certainly on her mind.

  “I wish you would have posed nude again today. Out here, against the mountains. I gave all the help the day off, you know.”

  “I know. But it’s too cold today. Maybe next time.”

  “There. That’s just the smile I want. Hold it for me, if you can. Just like that.”

  Ellison found that he was a little nervous about the painting. God, it was a long time, it must be a couple of years now, since he had really tried to paint anything at all. Would he really be able to do it now?

  He suddenly spotted the tube of paint he had been looking for. It was on a small stone ledge not an arm’s length from where he had set up his easel; now he recalled setting it down there. He picked up the tube and fidgeted with it and dropped it back into the paintbox. Then holding a stick of charcoal he looked at his model, and then beyond her to the mountains, where the changing sunlight made blue folds slowly appear and disappear. The light changing like that, and it was so long now since he had really tried. It was going to be hopeless.

  “Are we going to talk about Del, sometime?” Stephanie asked him suddenly.

  “What’s there to talk about?”

  “We both know that he’s still alive. You don’t have to be so cagey with me.”

  “Yes,” s
aid Ellison. He was not going to try to get the background in at all today. Only Stephanie. “Yes, well, don’t you think it’s wiser not to talk too much about the fact?”

  “No one can overhear us. I just wondered how much you knew about the—details. I know you’re handling business deals for him. Do you think anyone else knows he isn’t dead?”

  “I say it’s wiser not to talk, even out here. There could be someone up there, behind any of those rocks, listening. Directional microphones have amazing capabilities these days.”

  Stephanie glanced behind her at the hillside, then resumed her pose without appearing to be convinced. “Someone? Who?”

  “My dear, you must have some idea of how much that painting is worth. Whenever such amounts of money are concerned, a lot of people take an interest.”

  “Ellison, our phone might be tapped, but no one’s hiding up on that mountain twenty-four hours a day watching our house.”

  “How do you know that?”

  The sound of the doorchime came drifting cooly out through the open patio doors, from inside the cool caverns of the house. Ellison sighed, put down the charcoal stick, wiped his hands, and went to answer. Having all the help gone was not necessarily a boon. He supposed this would turn out to be some neighbor brat with Girl Scout cookies to sell.

  The boy standing at the front door was undersized and shabby. He was a total stranger to Ellison, yet at first glance Ellison knew he was not selling cookies. Nor was his presence here merely some routine mistake. The young face waiting had something extraordinary about it; and not only extraordinary but wrong. This unusual wrongness Ellison accepted as a sign that the visitor knew what door he stood at.

  “What is it?” Ellison demanded. In annoyance he used the lordliest tone he could produce, even though he was already sure that there would be no getting rid of this lad that easily.

  The young eyes, cloudy blue, looked back at Ellison. Most people would have seen in them a probability of innocence. But Ellison saw more, and worse.

  “I want to see Annie,” the apparition announced, in a voice whose boyish appeal seemed to have been practiced.

  The name meant nothing to Ellison. He only looked at the intruder, willing without much hope that he should go away.

  “Annie knows me. My name is Pat O’Grandison, I’m a good friend of hers. I know she lives here.”

  “No one named Annie lives in this house. Or ever has.”

  “You her father?” the youth asked doubtfully. “Maybe she’s not here right now, but if not she’ll be back soon. Has she run away from home, or something like that? If that’s it, she’ll soon be back.”

  Ellison heard a soft sound behind him, and turned to see Stephanie approaching. She came looking like a great Spanish lady, with the old shawl still round her shoulders. Her face was troubled as she stared at the visitor.

  Ellison spoke to his wife while nodding toward the boy. “One of Del’s old crowd perhaps?” he mused. “But he never brought any of them here, to my knowledge. I thought all that went on out in Arizona, not here under my roof.”

  Stephanie only shook her head slightly in reply. Eyeing the visitor up and down, she asked him: “Who are you? Why are you here?”

  The boy put out a frail arm to lean his weight tiredly against real adobe bricks. He scratched at one with a black-rimmed fingernail, as if he wondered what it was. “Can I come in and get a drink of water, please? It’s all right, I really know Annie.” Then he focused on Ellison suddenly; as if, Ellison thought uncomfortably, he might be trying to recall where he had seen the big graying man before.

  “I think we’d better let him in,” advised Stephanie. “He looks a little sick to me.”

  “On something, more likely.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Oh all right, let him in.”

  The boy came in and like someone near exhaustion dropped himself into the first handy chair. He was blond and undersized, dressed in travel-worn jeans with white road dust on them, and a plain T-shirt, once white. A small knapsack of fabric dull as camouflage lay on the floor beside his chair, one of its straps still resting limply in his slack right hand. His snub nose and beardless cheeks made him look no more than fifteen or so. But Ellison was sure that he was older.

  Several components of Ellison’s mind, one of them artistic, considered that young face with growing fascination. Here was one of Del’s people, certainly. The face was beautiful. And, leaving aside whatever might be due to present tiredness, there was that inward something that was very wrong, that had told Ellison at first glance that the boy was here for some real purpose. His coming meant trouble, maybe, but there was nothing accidental about it. Ellison wondered: Did Del send him here?

  He asked: “Have you been here before?”

  “No.” A hesitation. “Though I got the feeling that maybe I seen you someplace.”

  Ellison looked at him.

  “I guess I’m mistaken. Hey, if Annie’s not here, how about Helen? It just occurred to me, maybe it’s possible that you and I know this girl by different names? I mean, sometimes when people run away they’ll use a different name?”

  The blue eyes shifted from Ellison to Stephanie and back again. It was impossible to read just how much was truth in them, and how much guile.

  Ellison looked at his wife, trying to get some cue from her, but he couldn’t. She kept regarding the visitor very thoughtfully. At last Ellison said: “There was a girl named Helen in this family once, living in this house. She’s dead.”

  The boy considered that. He had slumped down in his chair until his head rested on its padded back. The strap of the backpack had fallen free of his limp fingers.

  Stephanie crouched down gracefully beside the chair. “Helen was my daughter. If we’re really talking about the same Helen. It’s true, she did run away from home once. And she is dead—there was a lot of publicity about it at the time. You must have read some of that? Seen it on television?”

  Then the visitor opened his mouth, then closed it again, evidently reconsidering whatever he had been going to say. “I didn’t know she was dead. Sorry.”

  “Where,” asked Ellison, “did you think that you had seen me before?”

  “I dunno. Maybe I was wrong about that, too. Sometimes my ideas get all, all screwed up.”

  Stephanie straightened up. She was smiling briskly, almost like a nurse, as she touched the youth on the shoulder. “You must be hungry and thirsty,” she said in bright inviting tones. “Come along with me to the kitchen, and we’ll see what we can find. What’s your name?”

  “Pat.” And Pat got up out of his chair quickly, following Stephanie like a puppy entranced by a first kind gesture.

  A few moments later, Ellison followed them both, keeping a little distance. Peering into the breakfast room, he could see the youth seated at table there, his back to Ellison, already chewing on something. Stephanie was pouring milk into a plastic tumbler for him. Beyond, in the kitchen, the sink was modestly stacked with dirty dishes from lunch. It would be tomorrow morning before any of the help came back.

  Once the wanderer in his dirty T-shirt had been launched on a meal, Stephanie rejoined Ellison for a conference. “What do you make of this?” she whispered.

  Ellison tugged her a little further from the kitchen, into the next room. “I don’t like it,” he answered in his own almost rumbling whisper. Then with a gesture he retreated further still, to where the boy had left his pack. Ellison bent and opened it. A dirty, lightweight jacket came to view, along with a few other items of spare clothing. In the bottom were some granola bars, their wrappers worn with a long time of jostling in the pack.

  Ellison stood, grunting. “And I don’t know what it’s about. But I’m going to take whatever steps are necessary to find out.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Oh, I could regale you now with all the sights and sounds and smells of fifteenth-century Rome. But it would be misleading, insofar as my story is concerned. The tru
th is, that at the time of my first visit to Rome I was scarcely aware of my surroundings except as they affected my search for Helen. I was beginning truly to wonder whether I might be the victim of some enchantment, so obsessively had the woman’s image, in paint and sketch and memory, come to dominate my thought. Of course I wanted revenge on her, and on her lover—but gradually I was coming to realize that I wanted something more as well. More than mere vengeance, however ferocious, would be needed to give me satisfaction. What exactly the other thing might be, I did not know. But I hoped I would know, in the first moment when I looked on her again.

  From Roman church to Roman church I plodded like a pilgrim, searching for the artist Perugino. I had not imagined there would be quite so many Roman churches. At my waist was the dagger that had once been left on a pillow, aimed at my head. Folded into my purse was a small bundle of sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, likenesses of the sister of the King of Hungary. I was having trouble finding any places to dispose of these pictures where I might reasonably expect them to be helpful.

  On the third day of my Roman search I found a small church where, one of its priests told me, an artisan named Perugino had been painting some murals a few months past. But the painter was certainly gone from the neighborhood now, gone completely away from Rome the priest thought, and his mistress with him if he had had one. The priest had never noticed any woman at all in Perugino’s company, let alone one speaking Hungarian and bearing a resemblance to my sketches.

  I thanked him, and took my search for Helen to one of the nearby taverns. There some local men said they thought they might have seen her—said it with an exchange of winks. They were sophisticated city-dwelling jokers, metropolitan wits who jested at the expense of the lovelorn barbarian on his fool’s quest. Somehow it was not plain to them that I was seeking vengeance and not love. I left one dead, two wounded, and had to take my searching elsewhere. My best talents are not in diplomacy, nor in the craft of the detective either.