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

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.

      Strangeways, 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