A Question of Time

Chapter 14

Jake was taking the morning off from work, without permission. Dragging with him a numb and resigned Camilla who wore her hat and sunglasses, he had sought a place well away from the house and cave, where he felt they had a chance of being able to talk safely, at least in broad daylight. They had gone down the little canyon, Jake leading the way and looking about him earnestly, until Camilla had asked him what he was looking for.

"The place where you used to sit drawing. Where we first met."

She shook her head slowly. "I don't know if we can get there, lover. If we can, it won't do us any good. Why d'you want that place?"

"I just did." He sighed. "I want a place where we can talk."

Camilla repeated what she had already told Jake several times: that during the hours of daylight they could talk freely anywhere, that Edgar was sure to be in his daytime refuge at this hour. But Jake still had a hard time freeing himself from the idea that the old man was likely to be in hiding, listening to them, anytime and anyplace.

At last, reaching an area that looked familiar, Camilla and Jake sat down side by side on a rock, right on the edge of the creek, whose voices today were only noise for Jake.

As soon as they were seated, he said: "I can't take it, Cam, watching him do that to you."

"How do you think I feel?"

"I don't know." He turned his head to gaze at her steadily. "When I was watching the two of you last night, it looked to me like maybe you were enjoying yourself."

"That's a rotten thing to say."

He was silent.

"There's only one way we can get out of this, Jake."

"I know. That's what I came out here to talk about."

"I guess I know what that one way is. I guess you've already told me. And you're right, but I'm still afraid."

Jake didn't want to speak. He couldn't shake the feeling that the old man was just waiting behind a rock somewhere, listening to them, ready to pounce.

"You know as well as I do, Jake. The only way to get ourselves out of here is—"

"Is."

"—is to kill him."

The words had been said again. Nobody pounced.

"Kill him. Then we'll have time to think, to look around, to find our way."

Camilla unpacked her sketch pad and some pencils. It was as if she had to do something with her hands. Now, at the same spot where Jake had first met Camilla, he once more watched her draw. They had a lot of planning to do, but neither of them said anything for a time.

She was wearing her hat and sunglasses, but still, after a little while, she had to move closer to the cliffs, seeking the shade. It seemed to Jake that she was growing ever more sensitive to the sun.

"Cam."

"What is it?"

She had turned her head toward him, and he stared at her mouth, her slightly parted lips. "Nothing, I guess. Just now I thought there was something funny about your teeth."

Slowly, somehow, the real planning started between them.

In all her months of living with Tyrrell, listening to him talk and observing him, Camilla had come, or believed that she had come, to understand not only the horror of the man but something of his weaknesses.

Jake with a conscious effort was building up his nerve. "All right, I'm ready to kill the son of a bitch. Truth to tell, I've been ready for some time. Now tell me how. How're we going to kill him?"

Camilla needed only a few seconds to think—as if she had already asked herself this question. "There's only one time—maybe two times—I've ever seen him hurt."

"Tell me."

"First time was only a little while after I moved in, when he got a wooden splinter in his hand, from the handle of one of his tools."

"That hurt him, huh?"

"More than a shotgun charge could do. He started to suck the blood out himself, after he pulled the splinter out—then he saw me watching him—then he got me to—

Jake could all too readily visualize her, sucking blood. He made an effort to blot the picture out.

Camilla shivered. From the look on her face now, Jake guessed that she'd found the act exciting also. She smiled sheepishly at Jake.

"What was the other time?" he asked.

"What…?"

"You said that twice you've seen him hurt."

"Oh. Well, he wasn't really hurt the other time… but he looked mighty uncomfortable. He was up late one morning, when the day dawned really cloudy. Then a hole opened up in the clouds suddenly, and the sun came through… Edgar looked sick for a moment, he looked really scared."

"Huh."

"And the next second he was gone. Not to the place where he always sleeps, but back into the cave. He spent that day in the cave with the lights out, making it as dark as he could. After sunset he came out, looking—tired. He'll never take a chance of getting himself caught out in bright sunlight."

For a moment they stared at each other.

Jake said at last: "No way we can make him do that."

"Doesn't seem like it, does it?"

Jake squinted at her. Presently he asked: "What about fire?"

Camilla had to think longer on this point; perhaps it was a new idea to her. At last she reported that Tyrrell was at least not indifferent to fire. "I can't remember seeing him stick his hand in flames, anything like that."

"Then let's figure fire is something we might try."

Another hour of discussion brought no great enlightenment. There seemed to the two young breathers to be three possible means by which they might accomplish their oppressor's destruction: wooden weapons, fire, or sunlight.

"There's another thing I'm worried about, Jake."

"What's that?"

"What if I got—pregnant?"

"Jesus. Are you?"

"I don't think so, but—he asked if I was. That last time we were—we were in the back of the cave."

Jake was silent, pondering. Maybe this didn't actually make his own situation any worse, but he didn't like it.

"And he was listening to me," Camilla said.

"Listening? What?"

"Listening. Putting his ear against my belly."

"Can he tell that way?"

"Said he couldn't be sure. If I was, it was too early to be sure."

"Anyway, what does the old man care if you're pregnant or not?"

"I don't know! I—don't—know!"

Jake took her in his arms. What began with the giving of mutual comfort and reassurance soon turned into passion.

When Camilla opened her mouth to cry out in pleasure, Jake recoiled with horror, rolling away from her.

"Jake, what happened? What is it?"

"It's—your teeth. They were—they looked like—"

She sat up, her eyes wild with fear, her hands to her mouth.

In the afternoon, Jake returned to work in the cave, digging and sweating and breaking rock, gathering the precious nodules. Somewhat to his own surprise, he found that he still wanted to work. That he was doing a good job, even taking pride in the fact.

That evening, back in the cottage, Camilla found Jake standing in the child's bedroom, contemplating the stuffed animal, and the forlorn lunch box.

"What're you doing, lover?"

"Thinking. Trying to think. But not getting anywhere." He pulled open the door to the bedroom closet. There on a shelf was the small clock that no one ever wound, that no longer ran. A metal box, inconspicuous, sat on the same shelf. Jake took it down and opened it.

Old papers and old photographs, looking like the kind of stuff that any family might save, but here somehow out of place.

Camilla was alarmed. "Better put that back, Jake. Tyrrell doesn't like either of us in this room, let alone going through his things."

Jake riffled through the stuff in the box, saw nothing that caught his interest, closed it, and put it back up on the shelf. "How come this house has a kid's room in it, anyway?"

Camilla took him by the arm, tugging him out of the room. She said: "Looks to me like his wife must have had a little girl."

Jake let himself be tugged. He tried to picture Tyrrell as a father. Oddly, it seemed possible.

Back in the main room of the house, Jake sat looking at the calendar on the kitchen wall, which still maintained that this was June of 1932.

Camilla saw him staring at the calendar. "What year was it, Jake? When you came in here?"

Jake turned his staring gaze on her. "Whaddya mean what year was it? This is nineteen thirty-five. I came in here only—a few days ago." The frightening thought returned that maybe it really had been a month. Maybe even longer. Raising a hand, he rubbed his chin; it was quite definitely bearded now.

He demanded: "What year did Tyrrell bring you in? Last year? Nineteen thirty-four?"

"Jake, you're wrong by thirty years. Thirty-one. I met him in Flagstaff in nineteen sixty-five."

Tyrrell, as far as his two breathing victims could determine, was practically indifferent to time—or if he kept time, it was only by some method of his own.

Jake noticed, however, that the old man was usually willing to talk about time. In fact it was one subject on which he tended to speak compulsively. Time, he once told Jake, hardly mattered to him, as long as he felt confident of being able to access the mundane world in at least the approximate era that he wanted.

Jake and Camilla continued sharing the house and the single adult bed. But only in the hours of daylight, shortly after dawn or before sunset, did they any longer make love, with a passion that had grown fierce and somehow hopeless.

Few nights passed during which the master did not summon Camilla to accompany him into the cave.

Once when Jake, driven by anguish, dared to demand a reason, the old man said with a wicked laugh that he wanted her to model for him.

Jake, knowing what he would see if he followed the pair, now usually remained in the house when Camilla was summoned. For hours he paced restlessly from one room to another, on the verge of doing something desperate—and more than likely suicidal.

Eventually, after an hour or so, Camilla would return to him. And now she refused to talk at all about what had happened between her and Tyrrell.

Several times she came back from these midnight excursions dreamy-eyed and looking openly happy, and Jake knew a sudden anguished impulse to murder her.

It troubled him also that she had now begun to sleep most of the day, in a troubled and exhausted fashion, and to be restless and wakeful during the night, as if waiting for the vampire's summons.

The next time that Jake tried to talk to Camilla about killing Tyrrell, she put him off, saying she was too tired.

How much time had really passed since he had been confined in this strange world, Jake could no longer even attempt to guess. But there came a day when he again was walking out of doors, beside the creek, with Camilla, feeling relatively safe in morning sunlight.

When he returned to full awareness of where he was and what he was doing—returned from a waking dream of something horrible—he heard himself pronouncing the words: "Then we'll get him with wood."

Camilla, for the moment looking no different than on the day he had first met her, strolled beside him, shaded as usual by her sunglasses and hat. She said: "Can't, not while he's awake. You've seen how strong he is, how fast he can move."

"If we could only get into that place where he sleeps," said Jake. Then he stopped suddenly, staring at the canyon wall a hundred yards away with red unseeing eyes. "Dynamite," he whispered, to himself.

The planning went on, intermittently.

"There's fire. You say that fire hurt him too."

Camilla nodded slowly.

Fire made Jake think of gasoline or diesel fuel, or kerosene. None of the first two were here in the Deep Canyon, but there was certainly kerosene, stored for the household lamps in a fifty-gallon drum that lay on its side in a homemade rack under a cottonwood some thirty yards or so behind the house. Presumably Tyrrell brought in more, somehow, from time to time.

As for the dynamite, Jake knew that Tyrrell had some stored for use in his quarrying. And Jake had learned something of the uses of fuses and blasting caps in his CCC work building trails. Edgar kept the dynamite locked up, but Jake, looking at the little shed, didn't see any reason why it couldn't be broken open.

"Maybe if we did it that way, we could still burn him up back there in his den. Even if the dynamite doesn't get him, or it doesn't open up the rock as neatly as we'd want it to."

No matter how they tried, any other ways of killing this monster were harder to imagine. Camilla swore repeatedly that the shooting she had witnessed had had no effect, and Jake, after what he'd now seen of Tyrrell with his own eyes, was ready to believe her.

Jake could think of no way to trap the evil one out in the bright sunlight. Could he possibly reflect sunlight in on him somehow when he was in his den? They'd need two or three big mirrors, which they didn't have, and then just hope it worked. That idea was too impractical even to mention to Camilla.

Jake demanded crazily: "Are you going to tell him, the next time he bites you in the neck? Tell him that we want him dead?"

Camilla shuddered and said she was revolted at the thought of doing that. She pleaded with Jake to take it easy on her.

"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."