“All right. I’ll just go say hello,” said Joe, and reached once more for his jacket. At the same time he sized up Bill and John, then let his gaze settle on the former. “Bill, you look bigger and uglier. Come out with me and back me up. Don’t say anything and don’t do anything unless it looks like I really need help. John, mind the store.”
* * *
Preston, who had heavy, dark eyebrows and a mustache to match, hadn’t moved. A second man, sharp-featured, built on a smaller scale but also strong and solid-looking, came from somewhere to join him, as Joe, with Bill staying a step behind, came hobbling out from the hotel. All four of their hands in jacket pockets, Smith and Preston watched their approach without expression.
Joe halted a couple of steps away. “You’re looking at my window. Anything I can help you with?”
“I don’t think so,” said Smith, evidently giving the question serious consideration. His sharp features split in a smile. “If I decide I need a shoeshine, I’ll let you know.”
The big man in the fur collar took a more direct approach. “You a cop?” he demanded.
Joe shook his head. “Not any more,” he answered mildly. “But they’re not far away. Smith and Preston, huh?”
Smith turned his head to Preston. “D’ja hear that? I think the gimp is threatening us with cops. Maybe our lawyer ought to talk to him.”
Preston gave what was probably a well-practiced impression of a man whose inner rage was mounting swiftly. He spat in the general direction of Joe’s shoes. Out of the corner of his eye Joe saw Bill start to step forward and then hold back.
A couple of Park rangers in their tan uniforms and Smokey the Bear hats were coming along the walk among the usual gaggle of tourists. The rangers were talking geology, not paying any attention yet to four unhappy-looking men who stood in a loose group. Balancing on his cane, Joe reached out with quick, deft fingers, and snatched the cigarette from between Preston’s fingers. He crushed out the glowing end on the furry lapel of the man’s expensive jacket, so a fine thin wisp of smoke went up into the air of the winter afternoon. The gesture was quick and unobtrusive, as if he were only brushing away a little dust.
Preston twitched and started, as if the fur had been his skin. He said three foul words in a low, distinct voice. He started to sway forward.
Smith, aware of the Rangers nearby, put out an arm to hold him back. It was more of a gesture than a tug, but it succeeded.
To Joe, Smith said, in a new, dangerous voice: “Tell Brainard he better pay his debts. Paying debts is a law of nature, see, gimp? Sooner or later we all have to do it. Sooner or later.”
“I’ll tell him,” Joe said flatly.
* * *
Old Sarah was sitting with her eyes closed, trying to remember. Was it only her imagination, or did a ghost of memory really come teasing back, a strangely-dressed young man who had dropped in at the house on the Rim one warm afternoon in the early thirties?
So many peculiar things had happened to her in the thirties. When you lived with a vampire, when you lived with Edgar Tyrrell, what difference more or less one strange young man?
Had the young man stayed until Edgar appeared, shortly after sunset? Or had Sarah, as she hoped she was remembering, managed quietly to save his life?
But the thirties were gone now, out of reach for her if perhaps not for Edgar. The most important thing, of course, was the modern evidence provided by Bill and his photographs, evidence that Cathy at least was still alive, and not being held somewhere against her will.
Nothing really helpful about Edgar, though. What helpful news could there ever be about him? The only helpful news would be, perhaps, that he was dead; sooner or later the true death came for all, even the nosferatu. But in Edgar’s case, in the case of a man who so often did tricks with time—or perhaps, one with whom time so often played its own tricks—not even a confirmed report of death would guarantee that he could henceforward be considered harmless.
Sarah shuddered.
She had never really understood the work to which her husband had devoted his life. The research, the art—whatever the right name for it was—which had fascinated her husband and evidently still obsessed him, beyond all the attractions to which normal humans could be subject.
Sarah had never understood his work. But she had learned to fear it terribly.
* * *
Joe, re-entering his hotel room, said to the waiting Brainard: “They’re gone for now.”
“Thanks.”
“Por nada. I don’t think they’ve gone very far.”
“I know it.”
“But I’ve at least given them something to think about. I can get in touch with some people I know, try and see if these guys are wanted for anything.”
“A temporary expedient. I appreciate it, but…”
“You’re right.”
* * *
Maria Torres, roused from a reverie by someone’s voice calling her name, found herself leaning over a balcony at the Tyrrell House, contemplating the depths. Something very alluring was down there…
Daydreaming. She was daydreaming on the job. Maybe this was just the kind of thing the Canyon did to people.
Chapter Eleven
Half an hour after sunset, on the day after Jake’s abortive attempt to start a fight with Edgar, the two of them were in the workshop-cave together, talking calmly and unhurriedly about the job. Jake’s right arm still ached when he moved it in certain ways, but other than that it was almost as if yesterday’s scuffle had been forgotten.
Edgar was inspecting the day’s work Jake had just accomplished. Basically the boss’s comments were favorable, though now and then he pointed out some detail with which he was not completely satisfied.
Jake had spent the day mining the deep Vishnu schist in the bottom of the cave for small white nodules. Edgar kept a sizable collection of these on his long workbench and in bins just below it. He used some of the nodules for his carvings. Jake had seen him carry others back toward the secret rear chamber of the cave, putting them down on the floor of the cave just in front of the crevice, as if sooner or later that would be their destination.
* * *
The mining itself, working hard rock with nothing but hand tools, had gone very slowly today. To Jake’s relief, Edgar didn’t seem to care that the process was a slow one, only that the search for nodules should be thorough and that Jake should occupy himself with it during most of the daylight hours. Every time he discovered one of the lumps of peculiar white stone, he had to excavate it carefully, undercutting to free it at the bottom. Then he carried it to the workbench, where he sorted all nodules by shape and size.
The bench was a long, crudely built but well-lighted wooden table, running along one wall of the cave beside the entrance. Here a dozen or two of the white nodules of modest size were scattered, a couple of them fixed to the bench in jigs and clamps, obviously in the process of being carved into the likenesses of living things. The white stuff was stone—at least Jake wouldn’t have known how else to classify it—but in its feel and texture unlike any other material that he had ever handled.
Edgar told Jake that he, Edgar, had gathered some of the nodules already on the workbench, from the local rapids in the Colorado. Edgar also cautioned him—quite unnecessarily—that such methods of collection were not something that either Jake or Camilla could undertake and expect to survive.
Actually there seemed to be plenty of white nodules here now, as Jake could see for himself. He wondered momentarily whether Edgar really needed or wanted more of them, or if he just wanted to keep Jake busy and out of mischief. Camilla’s warning that Edgar really wanted something else from both of them came back to Jake now.
Most of the day Jake had worked with his shirt off, sweating like a pig. The cave was a little cooler than the sunbaked canyon outside, but not much. He took frequent breaks, and at intervals during the hot hours Camilla brought him cold lemonade. He had had the electric lights turned on for part of
his workday; he needed them if he really wanted to get a good look at what he was doing, unless the sun was coming in the entrance at just the proper angle. They were still on now, of course. Jake noted that Edgar’s vision seemed to be extremely good. The old man could see small details from a distance, and he wore no glasses.
On the job Jake used hammers and pry bars and chisels. Edgar had explosives on hand—Jake had seen the little locked-up shed, just outside the mine—but said he rarely employed them.
Edgar was saying to him now: “I’ve tried dynamite, but this is a ticklish place to try to blast; much better to dig out what’s wanted carefully, with hand tools. That’s where you come in.”
Jake nodded. The old man today was taking such a reasonable, businesslike attitude that Jake couldn’t help getting the feeling, in spite of everything, that there was some chance this would turn out after all to be a decent, acceptable job. It was a crazy attitude, he realized whenever he stopped to think about it; but somehow when Tyrrell was talking so reasonably it seemed only natural.
“What’s back there?” Jake inquired, nodding toward the almost completely blocked chamber at the rear of the cave. Things were going so reasonably at the moment he thought he might receive an answer.
Edgar looked at him. Then: “My work,” said the old man shortly, putting a slight emphasis on the first word.
* * *
“Hey,” said Jake, half an hour after arriving back in the little house, about an hour after sunset. It was almost the first syllable he’d uttered since Edgar had told him he could go home for the night.
At the moment he was standing in front of the electric refrigerator, holding the door open and looking in. A strange fact had just caught his attention, and he was wondering how he could have been so slow to notice it.
“What?” Camilla, moving around behind Jake, was in the prosaic process of getting dinner ready.
“Somebody went to the store, looks like.”
Only last night Jake had become aware, without really giving the matter any intelligent thought, that the stocks of supplies in the refrigerator were starting to run short. The cabinet shelves had still been deep in canned goods; there was no prospect of actual starvation, and so he hadn’t really thought about where the eggs and ham and cheese were coming from. But this morning there had been fresh food, as there was now.
Overnight, somehow, the refrigerator had been newly stocked. “Where’d all this stuff come from? There’s eggs, there’s beer, there’s apples—”
“Edgar brings it. He brought stuff last night. Every week or so he goes on what he calls a shopping trip up to the Rim. The real Rim, the one where there are people. Some of the stuff he steals from El Tovar, some he gets in other places.”
Thoughtfully Jake hefted a little wooden box of Kraft cheese. The fact of the familiar brand name on the box was heartening. It proved that the real world wasn’t entirely out of reach. “Somehow I thought he stayed down here all the time.”
“He says he’d like to stay here all the time and work, he grumbles about having to go out. But he needs tools and other stuff. So while he’s up there he gets some breathers’ food.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what we are. You and me. We’re breathers. Edgar isn’t. You didn’t notice yet? Edgar doesn’t breathe.”
Jake stared. But now he was beginning to know that here in the Deep Canyon, the stranger a thing sounded, the more likely it was to be true.
Camilla was nodding. “That’s right. Watch him close, next chance you get. No breathing, unless he needs the air to talk.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Jake, that’s what vampires are like.”
“Vampires. You mean like in the movies.”
“No. Not like that.” Looking back at the restocked shelves, Camilla giggled strangely. “The way he stocked up this time, it looks like he really wants to keep both of us going.”
After a time Jake said: “He must need food for himself.”
“He doesn’t eat like you and me. Not like breathing people.”
“Huh?”
“Warm blood is all that Edgar really needs. Could be my blood, or yours, or a dog’s. He sometimes catches him a wild animal, big or small, and drinks its blood.”
Jake couldn’t answer.
Too many things, impossible things, had forced themselves into his life, made themselves part of his vision of reality, over the last couple of days. By his own subjective reckoning, he had only been gone from the CCC camp three days. He wondered if that was, if that could be, right. He could believe Camilla now, that time, like the big river itself, ran different here in the Deep Canyon.
He said: “I wonder what they’re doing back at camp.”
“Ha. They might have forgotten you already. On their calendar, you might already have been gone a month.”
Yesterday Camilla had talked casually about taking the shotgun, loading it with something lighter than what the bears required, and bringing in some rabbits. And there didn’t appear to be much trouble catching fish. Behind the house she had also started a small kitchen garden, where Jake could identify carrots and tomatoes, among some tough western weeds that were threatening to take over. A branch line from the waterpipe that came in to the house from the creek was arranged to water the garden at the turn of a spigot.
But the old man’s foraging expeditions were much more interesting. “So, Edgar brings in all this store-bought stuff, eggs and canned goods and beer?”
“Right. He wants us well-fed.” Again she giggled. “He’ll bring you some new clothes if you want. He brings me some. I ask him for cigarettes, but he says they’re bad.”
“How does he get out of here, when he goes on these trips to the rim? I mean what path does he follow?”
She shrugged. “He just goes. Vampires can do it. Maybe not all of them, but he can.”
“Come on.” Softly Jake was trying to coax her out of being crazy. “How d’ya know he’s a vampire?”
“I know.” Camilla raised one hand to rub her throat.
“Come on.”
Camilla shook her head, as if she could read Jake’s thoughts. “You’ll know I’m crazy, lover, if I tell you all about what Edgar can do. You just watch for yourself. You’re gonna see a lot of him from now on. And you better do the job he gave you in the cave, lover. You really better.”
Remembering the strength that had caught and wrenched his arm, made him helpless as a baby, Jake had to agree with that, at least.
* * *
When Jake went back to work in the morning, he discovered that sometime during the preceding night Edgar had harvested a massive chunk of deep Vishnu schist from somewhere in the bed of the river—the rock was still wet, and there were tiny shellfish still clinging to one side. Then he had somehow brought the slab, which must have weighed five or six hundred pounds, up the side canyon to the workshop.
All by himself? Jake could believe that now.
On the workbench was a small note, in neat, precise handwriting, changing Jake’s orders for the day slightly, and signed ‘Tyrrell.’
Jake started to work accordingly, concentrating on the slab, breaking it up and mining it for nodules.
Tyrrell reappeared promptly at dusk, just when Jake was getting ready to knock off work for the day. He examined Jake’s crop of white nodules carefully, and declared himself reasonably satisfied.
A few minutes later, alone in the house with Camilla, Jake said: “Jeez, the way he handles tools, the strength he has, he could have done in half an hour what took me all day. Maybe he could have done it even faster. What’s he need me for? Why’s he need either of us?”
“I told you once what I really thought.”
“I remember. About him wanting our lives. But I just don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand it either, lover. It’s just a feeling.”
* * *
An hour or two before dawn, Jake snapped awake. Some alien force or presence had shaken the bed that he was lyi
ng in. He came fully awake to realize that Edgar was in the bedroom with him and Camilla.
There was only the faint light of the night sky, coming in through the curtains on the shadeless windows, to illuminate the room. But this was light enough for Jake to see Edgar, dressed as usual, standing at bedside, one arm around Camilla’s naked body. She was already half out of bed, with Edgar’s help getting up to an unsteady balance on her feet.
Jake, with his right arm still aching from yesterday’s combat, put one foot on the floor and started an unthinking, angry lunge at Edgar.
Edgar effortlessly shoved him back, so that he went staggering across the little bedroom, striking his head against the far wall, sliding down to a sitting position on the floor.
Slowly Jake rose and regained his balance. Camilla, her arms at her sides, was now standing beside the bed. He saw with a chill feeling of horror that she appeared to be still asleep, her body swaying lightly. And Jake saw, with a minor shock, that her eyes were still closed, her face serenely untroubled.
Edgar stood nearby, the fingertips of his right hand barely touching Camilla’s upper arm. With gestures and a single whispered word, he conveyed to Camilla what he wanted her to do. After a moment’s hesitation she obeyed the command, whatever it had been. Walking to the door, naked as she was, she went on out. Edgar followed her.
“Cam! Wake up!” Jake shouted as she disappeared. But neither she nor Edgar paid him the least attention.
Jake pulled on his trousers and rushed after the receding figures. He detoured sufficiently to grab up a breadknife from the kitchen table, and still caught the deliberately moving Edgar and Camilla at the front door of the house. He aimed the knife at Edgar. Edgar effortlessly caught Jake’s arm and once more, with an almost absentminded motion, hurled him aside like a small child.
A Question Of Time Page 14