A Question Of Time, Fred Saberhagen [best fiction books to read .TXT] 📗

and he wasn’t about to use his flashlight for that purpose. The movement of the moon across the sky would let him estimate time’s passage accurately enough to satisfy his own curiosity.

      Another hour or so had passed, and it was beginning to seem to Bill, at least, that things were likely to remain quiet all night, when the next sound came. This time it came from the direction of the house, and this time there was no doubt that it meant trouble.

* * *

      A crash of glass was blended with yells in several different voices. Then Bill heard heavier impacts, like a hammer pounding on boards or logs. Additional shouts and bangings followed.

      In the midst of the uproar there sounded a single gunshot.

      Looking toward the house, shrouded as it was in gloom except for faint lamplight at a couple of windows, Bill could see nothing out of the ordinary.

      For the moment, not seeing anything else to do, he stood his ground.

* * *

      Maria, who had been still faithfully keeping the client company, saw a moving light behind the window curtain. Then in the next moment the light—it had to be only some kind of strange reflection—was actually in the room with her.

      Old Sarah, who a moment ago had been asleep, was sitting bolt upright in her bed.

      Maria saw—and then forgot that she had seen—the figure of a man, standing close in front of her. And then, for the time being, she saw and heard no more.

* * *

      Joe Keogh, when the uproar broke upon the quiet night, started to rush for the ladder to get back up into the house, but then remembered that the trapdoor should still be locked or latched on the inside. Slowly he retreated to his original position, watching and listening.

* * *

      Bill stood for a long moment indecisive, half in and half out of moonlight now, on the verge of charging back up to the house, in the name of doing something. But then the thought of the locked trapdoor passed through Bill’s mind as it had through Joe’s. Followed by the sudden suspicion that all this noise might be meant as a distraction, to draw him away from the place where he had been posted.

      But before this state of indecision had endured for more than a second or two, Bill’s attention was drawn from the house, by the sight of first one strange figure and then another, striding downhill as if they had just come from Tyrrell’s old dwelling. Both figures were moving so swiftly and unexpectedly that both were past Bill before he could react in any purposeful way.

      A moment later Bill, reacting instinctively, had started in pursuit. Pulling out his flashlight, he turned it on, and in the same instant cried out for the two to halt. His shout had no visible effect.

      Even in the excitement of the moment it struck him as unsettling that his quarry, the figures of someone—or something—at least generally, vaguely human—were eerily not really running, but rather striding away from him, moving at the speed of runners, gliding downhill, departing untouched into the invisible depths of the Canyon.

      They were escaping, scot free, after making a mockery of Bill’s and his colleagues’ efforts to protect their client.

      Worse than defeat was insult. There was something indefinably daunting about the figures Bill had glimpsed—about that first one in particular—but he was a brave young man and did not hesitate, at least not more than momentarily, to pursue.

      His flashlight now failed to reveal anything of the foremost figure that fled from him down the slope—that appeared to have already vanished—but the beam afforded him one fairly clear look at the rearmost, who had paused momentarily. In Bill’s sight this took the form of a man, a total stranger as far as he could tell—gray-haired, and dressed in gray work clothing. Bill yelled at this man to halt.

      The gray-haired man paid not the least attention, but strode on, resuming his effortless Olympic pace.

      Bill, running now at something like full speed, started to give chase in earnest.

* * * * * *

      Joe Keogh had been able to catch only a fleeting glimpse of the same two figures. To him they were much more ominous, but in the next moment he saw something that scared him more—Bill, plunging heedlessly down the trail after them.

      Joe yelled for Bill to stop.

      If Bill heard Joe’s command, he paid no more attention to it than Bill’s quarry had to his.

      Joe, drawing in breath to yell again, started in full-speed pursuit also.

      But before he could shout Bill’s name a second time, or had run more than a few yards, Joe tripped and stumbled on the rough and unfamiliar trail. A numbing shock shot through his ankle, sudden forewarning of agony about to come. Joe fell, hardly aware of the impact of rock and dirt beneath his hands, scraping palms and fingers painfully on tough brush and unyielding rock.

      Heedlessly wasting what little breath he still retained on useless oaths, Joe struggled to his feet and tried to resume his run. One attempted step on his right leg was all he needed to convince him that he was through running for the night. He collapsed again, with a groan of pain.

* * *

      Meanwhile John Southerland, dutifully holding his assigned post at the front of the house, heard some disturbance inside, or, as he thought, at the rear. There was a crash of glass and other violent noise, accompanied by yells in several voices.

      John crouched slightly, alternating his attention between the house and the approaches to it, from which the last tourist had disappeared more than an hour ago. He refused to let himself be drawn away from his post, on the chance that the disturbance was

really a planned distraction.

* * * * * *

      Gradually Maria became aware that Gerald Brainard, trembling and muttering, carrying a heavy revolver in hand, was standing beside her chair, in the room