A Question of Time

Chapter 12

The time at the Greenwich meridian, only ten minutes of longitude east of London, was two minutes past midnight. The penultimate day of the old year just beginning. The man who in Arizona had called himself Strangeways was now standing alone in the darkened parlor of a large Kentish country house, perhaps a quarter of a mile from the center of the village of Down.

For many years no one had lived in this house. But for some forty years of the nineteenth century it had been the home of Charles Darwin, and on most days of the late twentieth century it was open as a museum. Tourists came with some regularity, a comparatively small number of them who were interested enough to make the effort to find the place. At midnight, naturally, there were no other tourists and even the caretakers had long since retired to their own homes and beds.

For almost an hour the moderately tall figure of the sole nocturnal occupant had been standing, virtually motionless, in the great scientist's study. Shortly after the stroke of midnight he moved at last, lightly touched with his fingertips some of the shelved books, drew a deliberate breath to smell the furniture polish of the museum-like preservation in which the house lay bound. Standing close to the tall, dark case of Darwin's great old clock, he listened carefully to the heavy soft voice of the mechanism within. The silent visitor's investigatory methods, honed through centuries, were older than those of modern science, and in certain matters even more successful.

At almost three minutes after midnight the tall man turned his head sharply—his ears had caught a sound just outside the house. Someone was trying to get in. Smiling, he murmured a soft invitation, confident that ears as keen as his own, out there in the winter night, would hear.

Presently there came a gentle shimmering in the dark air of the study, followed by the quiet appearance of a soft but solid feminine form, brown-haired and youthful in appearance, dressed in the English fashion of a century ago.

Offering the newcomer a courtly bow in the style of a bygone age, the foreign visitor exchanged with her a few words of private tenderness.

Then he said: "I am sure you are aware, dear Mina, that this year marks the centennial of my first visit to England—and, of course, of our first meeting?"

The youthful-looking lady smiled. "Perfectly aware, dear Vlad. I was wondering if the entire year would pass before you commented on the fact." Her voice was as undeniably English as her dress.

"I have been busy," her companion said abstractedly. For a moment he stood with hands folded in front of him, looking almost like a vicar.

"Of course you have. And with important matters. I did not mean to chide." Graceful and poised, Mina patted the visitor to Britain on the arm.

"So." He drew a deep breath—an occasional habit of his which still persisted—and looked about him. "So, this is Darwin's house."

"No doubt about that, there's a sign outside." Mina was practical as always. "He lived and worked in this building for most of his life—I take it this is not your first visit?"

"A natural assumption on your part, my dear, because I entered the building without any recent invitation—but the truth is that I have never entered this house before. Once, however, almost a century ago, I was invited in. That was on my second—or was it perhaps my third?—visit to England. After a hundred years many such details escape me."

Mina laughed softly, an almost breathless sound. "To be sure. No doubt your invitation came from some maiden, the revelation of whose name you would still deem inadmissibly ungentlemanly… Vlad Drakulya, do you still suppose me jealous of the breathing kisses you received so long ago? For that matter, of those that, I am sure, you continue to receive?"

Her companion acknowledged the comment with a blink and a faint smile. "Kisses? Yes, indeed, kisses there were, to be sure… by the way, my dear, I have spoken with several of your countrymen since my arrival in Britain yesterday. I have even consulted at some length with one man in particular, who somehow—I confess I do not know how—knew that I was coming."

Even practical Mina appeared to be impressed. "An elder counselor, perhaps?"

"You may say so. One whom I have, for the past few years, been privileged to call friend. He was almost a thousand years of age when I was born. I will not speak his name…"

"I understand." The power of some names was not to be taken lightly. "And from this ancient and venerable Briton you have learned something that will be of help to you in your current difficulties across the sea?"

"I have learned several things." Drakulya spread out his arms. "To begin with, a man named Edgar Tyrrell once stood in this very room…"

The visitor spent the next minute or two telling his beloved Mina about Tyrrell.

Frowning, she asked: "And was your mysterious Tyrrell one of us, nosferatu, before he left England?"

"'I cannot be sure, but it seems likely. Darwin died in 1882, nine years before I first visited Britain. And Tyrrell, so interested in Darwin's work, did not appear in Arizona until almost fifty years later. That would argue a long life for a mere breather."

Presently, having absorbed as many useful impressions as he thought he might on this his first visit to Darwin's house—having at least temporarily sated his curiosity as to what might be discoverable in the dim study—the investigating vampire, with his vampire lady friend beside him, approached a tall window giving on the garden, and passed outside into the dank wintry English night. Both gentleman and lady traversed the locked window without disturbing either glass or wood, having no more difficulty than they had experienced with their entrance.

Pacing the frosted garden, with crisp grass crunching under his boots, Vlad Drakulya took note in passing of a helpful little sign intended to explain details of the grounds to tourists. Moments later he and his companion, following an arrow on the sign, had entered on Darwin's looping rustic footpath, used by the great breathing scientist for both exercise and meditation.

The footpath led them across a winter-quiet field, and through a little wood. Along this way the vampires stalked thoughtfully, speaking seldom, communing in silence with each other and with their surroundings. The man in particular was trying to sense the vibrations of the past and hear its deep inhuman voices. Not Darwin's past, no, he had already finished with that. Let Darwin rest in peace. His life, his house, his work, had served the investigator beautifully as the entrance way. But now entry had been accomplished. The real goal lay vastly deeper in the past. Almost immeasurably deeper. Darwin and Merlin were indistinguishably contemporaneous, seen from the perspective of the depth of centuries, of innumerable millennia, of incalculable ages that now required to be probed…

Recalled from reverie by the banal stirrings of physical hunger, the male vampire paused to tempt a fascinated rabbit closer among the trees of the small wood. Then a pounce—mercifully quick—and with a good appetite he and his companion fastidiously shared between them the small creature's blood.

Overhead, the dark skeletal fingers of Darwin's trees probed and questioned the chill sky.

Mina, her red lips again as clean as those of any breathing maiden—indeed, cleaner than most—indicated the bent limbs with a subtle gesture. "As if they might be sifting the starlight for messages; don't you think so, Vlad?"

"Very poetic; as to what I think, I think I have now, at last, begun to understand, my dear."

"To understand—?"

"I think I am ready to return to the Grand Canyon."

"A very fascinating place, I'm sure. Some day you must show it to me. And someday—but not now, for I can see that you are in a hurry—you must explain to me what it is that you have just come to understand."

"Some day I shall."

The pair kissed chastely. Moments later, the man changed form and spread his wings. Tonight the wings of his own altered body would carry him no farther than Gatwick; for transatlantic movement his fastest travel option was the same as that of the most mundane breather. He was about to board prosaic British Airways.

A few hours after leaving Darwin's house, snugly ensconced in driven, roaring metal at some forty thousand feet over the Atlantic, speeding westward toward Chicago, the vampire found time to think, and a great deal to think about.

To begin with, had Tyrrell as a mere breathing boy really known Darwin, who had died in his house at Down in April of 1882? About fifty years had passed between that possible meeting, and the time when Tyrrell—himself by then an old man on the breathers' scale—had met and married Sarah in Arizona.

Old Sarah would certainly know whether her husband had been a vampire when they were married. He, Drakulya, was going to have to talk to her as soon as possible after he reached the Canyon.

Or was it possible that Tyrrell had never known Darwin, though he, Drakulya, had now convinced himself that the former had at least once—whether breathing at the time or not—stood in the great scientist's house?

Whatever the exact relationship between Darwin and Tyrrell, the artist—and this was the important fact—had certainly absorbed some of the ideas of the scientist.

Not many hours after his departure from England, the returning passenger was standing in one of a row of phone booths in the great terminal at Chicago's O'Hare Field, trying his best to reach Joe Keogh in Arizona. But the effort was fruitless. Evidently no one was occupying Keogh's hotel room at the moment.

Drakulya thoughtfully replaced the receiver, ruminated for another moment, then tried a Chicago number, one he did not need to look up. In a matter of seconds he was speaking to Angie Southerland, young John's slightly younger wife.

When a woman's voice said, "Hello?" the caller intoned: "This is your Uncle Matthew, my dear." Of several of his names that Angle would probably have recognized, that was the one the caller thought most likely to put her at her ease.

"Oh," said Angie. The caller had been recognized. He was not surprised to hear how the young woman's voice dipped for just a moment into chill uncertainty, before it genuinely warmed.

When the initial exchange of civilities had been concluded, he said: "Your stalwart husband and I are currently engaged upon the same project, in Arizona. We have come to it by different paths, but…"

"I know." Angie sounded practical, as usual. "John told me he thought they would have a job at the Grand Canyon. He didn't tell me much about it, because he didn't know much himself."

"It would be helpful if you could do some research for us. For me, specifically."

The caller, in making this request, knew that Angie had at her fingertips electronic connections with such esoteric things as data bases and so-called bulletin boards. By such means Joe Keogh's agency in Chicago had access to vast realms of information across the country and around the world.

"Joe's already called and asked me to look up some things having to do with the case. I can tell you what I've found out so far."

"Ah. I would appreciate that."

Angie said: "To begin with, Edgar Tyrrell was declared legally dead in 1940, at the request of his widow. He had disappeared seven years earlier, around the middle of 1933, on one of his frequent hikes into the Canyon. He's described as 'elderly' at the time of his disappearance, when he'd been living on the South Rim for around thirty years."

"Would you be good enough to read me the entire account, my dear?"

Angie would, and did. The newspapers of 1933 reported concisely that the eccentric sculptor and near-recluse had left a young wife and a small child, both of whom were reported as living in the old house on the rim. By 1940 Sarah Tyrrell was living on the East Coast, and there was no further mention of a child.

At least one small item in another old newspaper suggested that eventually Sarah Tyrrell had begun to get a name for being as eccentric as her aged husband had been.

"And the little girl," asked Drakulya. "What happened to her?"

There was a silence on the phone, except for the noise Angie's busy fingers were making on her keyboard, evoking knowledge from some electromagnetic cache perhaps again halfway across the continent.

What, thought the man on the other end of the phone line, would Merlin think of this means of divination?

At last Angie said: "1933 is the last mention of any Tyrrell child I've come across. As far as I've been able to tell from looking at old newspapers, she dropped out of sight permanently at that point."

"And the child's name?"

"Do you know, I can't find one for her."

"And the subsequent activities of Mrs. Tyrrell? After 1940?"

"Have been only very scantily reported in the news. Starting in the sixties, there are a few items—a small mention here and there, as inheritor of her husband's estate. Oh, and there's this. From the sixties on, this Mr. Gerald Brainard, her nephew, evidently began to be involved in his aunt's business affairs."

"Confirming what we had heard. Thank you."

Presently the phone conversation was over. Ignoring the noise and bustle of the world's busiest airport swirling around his phone booth, the returning traveler tried once more to reach Joe Keogh in Arizona. This time the effort was successful.

The man in Chicago communicated his thoughts to the man in Arizona. Then the caller was moved to philosophize.

There was no reason, Drakulya commented, no good reason why a vampire could not be a scientist, or an artist. "As we know, the two abilities are similar."

"I suppose you're right."

"Of course I am right. Quite a few of the nosferatu breed, myself included, collect objets d'art, but almost none of us create such works. This fact has for some time puzzled and worried me, Joseph—but I am keeping you from important work."

A minute later, Joe Keogh in his suite in El Tovar was hanging up his phone and reaching for his jacket and his cane. He wanted to question Sarah Tyrrell about her daughter, and since there was no phone in the Tyrrell House, he was going to have to make the trip on foot yet again.

People in the lobby of El Tovar were talking about snow in the forecast, and once Joe was outside, the look of the wintry morning sky and the smell of the cold wind confirmed that a real snowstorm was almost certainly on the way.