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

methodically organized, even if they delayed the start a little.

      He warned those who were going with him that they were volunteering for a perilous foray into a territory where none of them had ever been before: the territory of the vampire Edgar Tyrrell.

      “More importantly, we are going into the domain of a unique creature. One that is stranger than any vampire I have ever known—and in some ways, at least, more dangerous.”

      Joe Keogh said: “One of my people is missing. We all understand it’s dangerous, now how soon do we get started?”

      “You do not get started, Joseph. You remain here, on the Rim.”

      “My ankle is all right.”

      “It is not. Great agility may be needed down below. More than two or three people will not be needed.” Strangeways looked at John Southerland and Bill Burdon. “You two will come with me.”

      “The more people we have,” said Joe, “the better we can search.”

      Bill, unconsciously ignoring the man who was still formally his employer, acknowledged the orders of the new leader with a businesslike nod. John, who had some idea of what he might be getting into, looked very thoughtful. But he nodded too.

      “I’ve still got Brainard’s gun,” Joe said suddenly.

      Drakulya looked at him again. “Then I think you should give it to whichever of these young men you think better able to use it. We may also face mundane perils below, against which firearms could be useful.”

      “Once we get down there,” Bill was volunteering, “I can probably find my way back to the place where I found Cathy’s camp.”

      “That may be useful. We shall see.”

      Meanwhile Joe was pulling out the parts of the revolver. He had carried it, disassembled, in his coat pockets to this meeting, on the chance it might be wanted. “It’ll just take me a minute to put this back together.”

      Drakulya viewed the pieces of firearm with innate distaste, but nodded. “No doubt it will be effective against certain creatures of the Miocene, who as I understand have no respect at all for humanity. I expect to be fully occupied with other matters.”

* * *

      At this point old Sarah emerged from the bedroom, where she had changed into trousers and a woolen shirt.

      “Mr. Strangeways, I am going with you.”

      No one said anything. Everyone present looked at Sarah’s aged, frail form.

      But she persisted. “How will you find the cottage, and the cave, if I do not show you? I think Cathy will have gone there, this time, and I suppose the other one is with her.”

      Strangeways gave his little reptilian sigh. “Your suggestion has merit,” he conceded.

      Joe was outraged. “If an eighty-year-old woman is going—”

      The bearded leader silenced him, for the moment, with a raised hand.

      “If you do not take me with you,” continued Sarah, “I shall go down by myself, if I die on the way. Two young lives are at stake.”

      Drakulya studied her for a long moment, then bowed lightly. “As you wish,” he said. “In the face of such determination—” He looked at Joe. “Very well, both of you. Provided you follow my orders.”

* * *

      A few minutes later, Drakulya led his four followers out of the house. Old Sarah, jacketed and booted like the rest, walked beside him, leaning lightly on his arm. Her eyes were dreamy, as if in her mind she had already completed this journey into the past. The little procession passed into the snow-hazed light of midafternoon, moving unnoticed among tourists toward Bright Angel trailhead. Joe now had Brainard’s revolver, reassembled, loaded and tucked into an inside pocket of his winter jacket. Everyone but Sarah was carrying a canteen and some trail food.

* * *

      Cathy, fleeing into darkness from the lighted workshop-cave, turned to see her father apparently engaged in some kind of friendly discussion with the thing of lights and changing shapes—somehow, she thought, he must have called it back from following Maria.

      But she, Cathy, could not go near the thing. Suppressing a sob, she turned and ran again. The night was not yet too dark for her to find a path. For whatever reason, she was not pursued.

* * *

      The night, under a sky that held what looked like a million stars and an incredibly large crescent of a moon, never grew too dark for Cathy to find a place to walk. But the absence of familiar constellations was disconcerting, and the cacophony of unfamiliar animal noises even more so. Ignoring these oddities as best she could, she pushed on down the canyon. This was still her childhood home.

      On the bank of the marvelous, starlit river she paused to rest, sitting on a boulder, thinking of what her father—she could not help still thinking of him as her real father—had told her about rapids in the flow of time.

      Time passed. The sound of a footstep moving gravel jarred Cathy back to an awareness of her immediate surroundings.

      It was only Maria, approaching in the starlight.

      “Cathy? Thank God it’s you. Help me. It—that thing—has stopped chasing me. But it wants me.”

      “Those people, moving in the light?”

      “They’re not really people, not any more. There are at least two of them in it now. They come out and talk sometimes, and I thought at first that they were real. But I’m sure now that they’re not really people any more. They’re just in there, with all those—animals. All part of one great—thing.”

      Maria came close, and stood directly in front of Cathy.

      Cathy said: “My father wouldn’t—” But then she remembered her father’s vague warnings about danger in the Deep Canyon, what he had said about Maria’s fate not mattering.

      “Cathy.”

      “What?”

      “Stay with me. How long is it till dawn?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “What are we going to do?”

      “When it’s light again we’ll go back to the house.”

      “And then?”

      “And then I don’t know.”

* * *

      The five people slowly descending Bright Angel Trail had left the late twentieth century and its swarming tourists well behind them. Drakulya and his four followers moved through a shrunken, adolescent Canyon, among the flora and