A Question Of Time

by Fred Saberhagen

Drakulya had done with arguing. He spread his arms, and murmured magic.

  To Joe Keogh, standing by with Brainard’s pistol ready, the language sounded something like simple German. But he knew it must be more than that.

  Suddenly, the ground of the Deep Canyon quivered underneath Joe’s feet. Others were feeling a great change too; uneasiness spread among the group.

  “Hello. I’m Jake.”

  Tyrrell was gone again. Now the creature showed the face of the green-eyed young man, whoever he had been in life. It called itself by Jake’s name, and then once more by Camilla’s.

  Camilla and Jake appeared in rapid alternation, each of them calling for the other. For a brief time their voices sounded desperate.

  Then the young man, whose cheerfulness seemed to have been fully recovered, held the stage again. “This is Jake, everybody. We’re going to be friends.”

  Maria had been slowly making her way to join her rescuers. Like most of them, she watched in awe and fear.

  Drakulya’s arms were still extended, his lips still murmured words.

  * * *

  The creature was visibly beginning to dissolve under his magical assault—the powers of the earth, Joe thought, were re-ordering themselves. Sequentially the thing of light disgorged a number of animals. Joe could recognize bears and deer. His mind recoiled from less familiar shapes.

  * * *

  Tyrrell had not yet been vanquished. He reappeared again, shouting something to Sarah—Joe could not understand the words. He called his daughter’s name for a last time.

  * * *

  Cathy did not seem to hear. Her full attention was somewhere else.

  “I need tools, physical tools,” Drakulya cried to her, and to Sarah. “Where are they kept?”

  “The workshop!”

  Willing young feet dashed away. Young hands were soon back, laden with heavy, mundane miner’s tools.

  “Those are my tools!” screamed the wraith of Jake, looming amid boiling light.

  Drakulya grabbed up a miner’s pick.

  The man who had been called Strangeways struck at the ground with iron, using all his strength. The tormented earth buckled up, sending people staggering, exposing a sharply demarcated seam between two layers of rock.

  “The Great Unconformity,” murmured Sarah.

  The seam writhed in the earth, as if it sought to position itself below the creature. The being, the thing, the structure of light, was beginning to unravel. In a startlingly brief time it was gone.

  The ground beneath the feet of the survivors ceased to heave convulsively. Instead it was bending, as if a hollowness were under it. The strata of rocks, no longer hard and dense, were stretching, changing uncontrollably.

  “Back, get back!” Drakulya had abandoned magic and was shouting at his friends. “Withdraw, retreat uphill!”

  Joe was still half-crippled, but with the adrenalin flowing and John Southerland’s strong shoulder offering support he could force himself to run uphill, through a rapidly altering landscape, out of the Deep Canyon. Drakulya ran beside him, carrying Sarah, with Cathy hovering nearby. Others were running on their own power, under a sky that suddenly and repeatedly changed its cloud-configuration and modified its light.

  Bill Burdon, feeling safe enough to turn for a look back, beheld a churning, upswelling mass of light and shadow, tones reversed as in a photographic negative, rapidly, silently, filling in the depths from which they had just climbed. He cried out in alarm: “Is that lava?”

  Their leader grunted: “No, only energy, but quite as dangerous. Stay ahead of it!”

  Rushing and scrambling, the visitors from the late twentieth century did their best to accomplish that.

  At last the rocky ground regained stability. Around them, mundane snow began to fall.

  Chapter Twenty

  The time on the South Rim was either shortly before, or shortly after midnight, on the last day of the old year—or else on the first of the new. After a day like the one he had just been through, Joe Keogh, now more or less collapsed in his room at El Tovar with his sore leg up on cushions, was not entirely sure which.

  Nor could he convince himself that it really mattered.

  Just across the room John Southerland was on the phone, completing a long-distance call to Angie back in Chicago, assuring her that the day’s dangerous business had been brought to a conclusion that was, by and large, acceptable if not entirely satisfactory. Only minutes ago Joe himself had finished a similar call to his own wife.

  Not very far outside the door of Joe’s suite, no farther away than the hotel lounge, appropriate holiday music was being played—just now Auld Lang Syne, at holiday volume.

  Tonight Mr. Strangeways and his companions were doing most of their celebrating within the solid log walls of El Tovar, but occasionally their party, or a strong contingent of it anyway, sallied forth onto the South Rim. Sometimes the strollers got as far as the Tyrrell House where Cathy and her mother were established, though they never strayed beyond shouting distance of the old hotel.

  Whenever any celebrants from the hotel walked out on the Rim, to one of the places along the very brink where they could turn their backs on the streetlights along the tourist walk, they found themselves confronted by the full company of the wintry stars, and by the vast imperturbable black midnight that was the Canyon.

  In the middle of one such sortie Maria Torres said to her nearest companion: “It’s a little frightening.” Then she almost laughed at herself. “It must sound silly to say that, after today. After what almost happened to us all. But I mean it anyway.”

  Maria was recovering very nicely. In fact, thanks to certain subtle ministrations performed by Mr. Strangeways, she no longer had any very clear memory of what had happened to her personally—or what had almost happened—only a few hours ago, down below.

  Now she frowned lightly at the Canyon’s darkness. “But … it’s not like me to blank out.”

  “Might happen once to anyone. I wouldn’t worry about it.” John, who had been ready to walk outside after making his phone call, was being as reassuringly avuncular as possible, given the slight disparity in ages.

  “I suppose you’re right.” Maria sounded doubtful.

  “Take my word for it.” John sipped from his can of beer. “What did you mean just now, when you said something is a little frightening?”

  “I meant how the people come out here with their New Year’s noisemakers, but all the noise that they can make is swallowed up. Like all the light we shine out over the brink. It all just disappears. There’s not the trace of an echo or a reflection or an answer.”

  * * * * * *

  Presently it was time to look in once again on Mrs. Tyrrell and Cathy, in the family house.

  A big tearful reunion had taken place between mother and daughter as soon as they were both safely out of the Deep Canyon.

  For many years Sarah had been afraid to reveal her identity as Cathy’s mother. But in fact the revelation had made the girl very happy.

  “Now I have a real live mother.”

  “A very old one, I’m afraid.”

  “Mothers are supposed to be old. Experienced. That’s what they’re supposed to be.”

  Cathy, who tonight was remembering the day’s events much more clearly than Maria, had mixed feelings about the loss of her original stepfather, that male figure of power remembered from her childhood.

  “Who was my real father, then?” she asked her mother.

  “Long dead, I’m afraid, my dear.”

  “I’m going to want a complete explanation, you know, of everything that’s happened. As complete as you can make it. But that can wait.”

  * * *

  With new and old pop music blaring alternately in the background, the survivors of the afternoon, except for Sarah and Cathy, gathered once more in Joe’s suite.

  It seemed to Joe that Bill Burdon was going somewhat out of his way to look after his young colleague Maria.

  Strangew
ays, having gathered some old and now some new members of his trusted inner circle indoors where they could be comfortable, was explaining some of the afternoon’s events.

  “Around sixty years ago, Edgar Tyrrell, having used the special powers of the nosferatu to find his way for the first time into what he christened the Deep Canyon, encountered the … what shall we call it? An anomaly in the planet’s life, a malformation, an artifact, perhaps, of the deep rock. Whatever it should be called, it had begun, ages before Tyrrell’s arrival on the scene, to achieve sentience.

  “His curiosity about the thing he had discovered caused him to nurture it, to feed it with new life—at first, no doubt, only with the lives of plants and animals. Service became devotion, and devotion eventually worship—I think that is not too strong a word. But it all began gradually, you must understand, in a spirit of intellectual inquiry. For years, for decades perhaps, he could still convince himself that he was only an investigator. An artist, with all that the word means, seeking to capture the essence of what he had discovered.

  “When we began our own investigation I was not sure whether Tyrrell might not have come here as a breather, and been converted to vampirism by the entity he had discovered. But now we know enough to be sure that he had already passed beyond the breathing mode of life before he arrived at the Canyon.”

  Most of the audience seemed too timid to ask questions. But not Joe. “You don’t think it was the thing itself that originally brought him to the Canyon.”

  “Almost certainly not. Rather he had somehow heard of the scientific possibilities—the first geological studies were made before 1860. The potential of such an incision into the secrets of the earth drew and fascinated him. What the fascinated seeker encountered in the deep rock was, by human standards, an alien kind of consciousness, though undeniably belonging to the earth as much as any human being does.

  “A few days ago, in Tyrrell’s native land, I spoke to one who gave me wise counsel—and even more than that. To destroy or slay this entity might well have been beyond my powers, and even beyond those of my borrowed magic. But by invoking the power of even deeper time, it became possible to release it—to undo the knot.”

  * * *

  The phone rang in Joe’s suite, and was duly answered, whereupon it became necessary to send a runner to fetch Cathy over from the phoneless Tyrrell House, and also someone to stay with Mrs. Tyrrell while Cathy came to talk. Her legally adoptive father was on the line, wishing everyone a happy New Year, cheerfully communicating the information that he was already somewhere in Nevada, that his luck had turned for the better. Brainard now seemed to think that his chances of surviving his current troubles were quite good.

  * * *

  When Cathy had finished her phone conversation, and had gone home to her mother again, Drakulya continued his exposition.

  “Our friend—my compatriot, if you will, Tyrrell—had been, consciously or not, in a sense creating, defining, or giving substance to his own god—making it in the image of the god he wanted.

  “But it was not in the nature of this creation to be benevolent toward its creator, or obedient to its self-proclaimed master.”

  “What’ll happen to Cathy now?”

  “I believe her to be what is now called a good survivor. Eventually she will be able to put all of these bizarre events behind her.”

  “And the rest of us,” said Bill Burdon, “are going to have quite a story to tell.” He looked hastily at Drakulya. “Someday,” the young man amended. “Someday, when we can expect to be believed.”

  THE END

  About The Author

  Fred Saberhagen is widely published in many areas of speculative fiction. He is best known for his Berserker, Swords, and Dracula series. Less known are the myth based fantasies: Books of the Gods. Fred also authored a number of non-series fantasy and science fiction novels and a great number of short stories. For more information on Fred visit his website: www.fredsaberhagen.com