Dominion, Fred Saberhagen [uplifting book club books TXT] 📗

   On the stone stairs his bare feet whispered almost silently. Now his scraped toe had begun to hurt. Jeez, but he was a mess, Vivian wouldn’t want to come near him, no one would. In the interior coolness of the castle, sweat was drying clammily on his skin. He ran a hand through tangled, dirty hair, dislodging a small leaf. His mosquito bites had started itching, his frustrated balls reproached him with dull swollen pain…

   At the first stair landing, he was distracted from this unhappy internal litany by… something. A nagging urge to turn aside here, explore a particular side hallway. The summons, whatever it was, was not from Vivian this time. But it was there.

   At the end of a short hall he opened a thick wooden door, and was surprised to find that it gave onto a circular gallery that went at balcony level around a stone room at least thirty feet across. Enough daylight to show the general configuration of the chamber found its way in through small windows at a level a floor higher than the balcony. In the middle of the stone floor below was a low dais, much resembling the outdoor table near the grotto. This place reminded Simon of something else too, and in a moment he understood what—a medical operating theater, something he had never seen except in movies and television. A small central stage with not much audience space around it, what little there was provided safely out of the way of the performers.

   But the most striking thing about this theatre was that the floor and the lower walls were blackened, scorched, in a pattern of streaked radü extending from the central table. The top of the dais itself was darkened too, solidly and in a different shade, as if exposed to repeated hard use and damage. It was quite clean now, as was the whole empty room, empty except for shadows.

   This had to be, Simon thought, the room in which Old Man Littlewood, whom Simon had never seen, had burned or blown himself to death five years ago, Simon had never been told just how. And now there were only shadows…

   For just a moment Simon thought he saw a man, someone standing at the edge of the floor, against the lower wall on the side where the blurred daytime shadows presently were thickest. But when he looked closely there was no one. Even when he closed his eyes, in an unconscious effort at the proper kind of concentration, his inner vision could detect no one.

   It was a spooky place and he wanted to turn and leave. But there was some important reason, still undiscovered, why he should not do that just yet. Instead he started walking round the gallery, like a small child trailing the fingers of his left hand on the stone balustrade. When he got about halfway around, he could see what was directly under the part of the gallery where he had been standing when he first entered. A cot was there, in shadows but with enough indirect light on it for Simon to make out the recumbent figure of a man. The man lay partly on his back, partly on one side, with the pale outline of his face turned directly in Simon’s direction.

   Gregory.

   It was very difficult to distinguish any features forty feet away, in the dim light, but Simon was sure. Gregory’s eyes were open—how could he really be sure of that?—and they might even be following Simon as he walked.

   Feeling a chill of fright and horror compounded, Simon walked on quickly, keeping his eyes on the man’s face as he moved. He told himself that Gregory had to be asleep, despite the impression of open eyes that tracked Simon as he walked. If he was awake he’d certainly sit up, say something, yell at Simon for intruding. Something about the way the man just lay there, as if he were watching Simon in his sleep, was horrible in the extreme. It brought to a focus all the strangenesses that Simon had seen or imagined about Gregory in the past. It forced Simon to begin to see him clearly.

   When Simon had got far enough round the gallery’s circle for the man on the cot to pass from his field of vision, he broke into a soft-footed run. Sweating again despite the coolness, he trotted quickly back out through the gallery’s single entrance, and closed the thick door behind him, as quickly as he could without making noise. And then even as he moved on he began to tell himself that the pale face and dark eyes following him must have been some kind of an illusion. Seeing something was one thing, and making sense out of what was seen was something else entirely. It wouldn’t make sense for Gregory to simply lie there and watch…as if he were in some kind of trance.

   And Saul had said, hadn’t he, that Gregory had gone with the other adults to Blackhawk; of course for Saul to lie, or be mistaken, would be no big surprise, but… Simon yearned to leave the castle as quickly as he could, running, wading, swimming, to get back to the other side of the river. But it was a hopeless yearning, like that of a soldier who knows the war must be finished before he can go home. Vivian was here. He couldn’t leave while there was a chance of finding her.

   Simon went back to the stairs, and up again to the next landing. Having got that far he paused, hearing somewhere—was it behind him?—a sound like the faint closing of a door. He listened but there was no other sound. To find Vivian, the direction to go was up and forward.

   When he came to a landing that felt right, he paused again and softly called her name.