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

* * *

      “Tomorrow morning, then,” said Jake at last. “As soon as the sun is up.”

      “Tomorrow morning,” Camilla agreed, in a whisper.

* * *

      Jake walked alone, thinking to himself. He still trusted Camilla, because he had to, even though she was no longer always the same person. He trusted her—but not entirely—because he had no choice.

* * *

      Jake sat hollow-eyed beside the canyon’s stream, listening to its voices. Telling himself he was trying to listen, but he thought that really he was maybe trying not to hear. There were exhortations to murder in the voices, and even stranger commands, that he had trouble understanding, and dared not wholly acknowledge even to himself.

* * *

      Tyrrell, working that evening in the cave with Jake, informed his prisoner that, according to mundane science, only very simple fossils were known to occur naturally in the deepest life-bearing rock down here, a layer of schist whose formation lay beyond an unimaginable gulf of time. Below those simple relics, the layers of lifeless Precambrian rock stretched back an enormously greater distance toward eternity.

      “Are you capable of imagining even a million years, Rezner?” asked Tyrrell, as the two men paused in the midst of their labors on the deep rock.

      “Why not? Anyway, I don’t have to imagine. I’ve already seen stranger things, since I met you.”

Chapter Fifteen

      On leaving Sarah Tyrrell, Drakulya walked back to El Tovar, intending to consult once more with Joe Keogh, and also to ask some questions of the adoptive father of the missing girl.

      Brainard still lying low in Joe Keogh’s suite, was made uneasy by the way Mr. Strangeways looked at him. Brainard in fact impressed his caller as a man who would dearly love to become invisible.

      Under steady scrutiny, Brainard looked from Joe to Strangeways and back again. Then he ventured: “You’re maybe—a friend of Mr. Tyrrell’s?”

      Strangeways shook his head. “I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting him. We do share a certain background, however.”

      Brainard nodded slowly. “I thought so. So maybe you’ll be able to find my daughter?”

      “As I have told your aunt, I will do what I can to help her. First, I would like you to tell me all you can about Tyrrell.”

      Brainard fumbled through several pockets before he found his cigarettes. “That won’t be much. He’s alive, down there somewhere, as far as I know. I haven’t seen him for a long time. And I’ve been doing business with him over the years. Honest business. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

      Another question elicited the information that Brainard himself had never been down into the Canyon, not even the most mundane modern version of the place, and he seemed to have no clear idea that a Canyon of any other time or shape might be accessible. He had never set foot on the main trails that descended from near the Village and whose upper portions at least were trampled daily by a thousand tourists. He was not expert or even interested in the out-of-doors. In fact, Brainard seemed to think it believable that a man had been hiding out for sixty years, in some sanctuary accessible without magic or its equivalent in science, within a mile or two of the swarming tourist activity on the South Rim.

      Drakulya said to him: “Tell me more about the business that you do with Tyrrell, and—since you ask—I will venture an opinion on its honesty.”

      “Well sir, there’s nothing wrong with the kind of business I do with Mr. Tyrrell. I’m a dealer in art. Specifically in his creations. There’s nothing very complicated about our arrangement—except that most people think he’s dead. But I’m not defrauding anyone, the pieces I deliver are genuine. Mr. Tyrrell carves statues, and I sell them for him. Unlike paintings, carved stone is very difficult to date, so the buyers just assume these items were done in the thirties, or even earlier. The man has a right to sell his own creations, doesn’t he? And a right to employ me as an agent?”

      At this point Joe interjected: “His wife also has a legal right to his estate. But as I read the situation, she’s not getting most of the money from these deals that you conclude.”

      “Is Sarah complaining?” Brainard demanded.

      Mr. Strangeways made a slight gesture in Joe’s direction, as if to silence him. Looking steadily at Brainard, he said: “Tell us, please, just how this arrangement began, between the two of you.”

      “Sure.” Brainard looked at the ceiling, considering. “It was back in the early sixties, and I was here looking over some things for my aunt—she usually does her best to avoid spending any time here. But she never wanted to turn the place over to the Park Service completely.

      “Well, I’d come here one day to take a look at some of the furnishings in the Tyrrell House, to see what they might be worth. I was staying in the place overnight, when—he showed up, in the middle of the night. Surprised the hell out of me.”

      “Showed up—under what circumstances?”

      “I was sitting there in a chair, thinking—actually I supposed I dozed off in front of a fire. Then something woke me up—a dream, I thought at first. Then I heard someone in another room. I went to look, and he was just standing there. At first I thought he might be a burglar—but he soon convinced me he wasn’t.”

      “Then he made no strenuous effort to avoid discovery.”

      “I—suppose not. Maybe he was curious about me.”

      “And how did you recognize him?”

      “Oh, I’d seen several of the old photographs. And, being in the house, I’d also been thinking about him … but above all I think it was the way he just told me who he was, when I asked him. Very calm, low-key, and self-assured. Still, that he was really Edgar Tyrrell was a little more than I could believe at first—also, I may add, that meeting was one of the