A Question of Time

Chapter 17

Cathy Brainard was once more trudging her way down Bright Angel Trail, headed for the Deep Canyon. This time she had left all of her camping equipment behind, except for a canteen.

And this time Maria Torres was walking stride for stride down the trail with Cathy. Maria had not even bothered bringing a canteen.

The two young women had met, without conscious prearrangment, up on the broad pedestrian rim walk, near the Bright Angel trailhead. They had scarcely seen each other before this meeting, yet on encountering each other on the walk they had agreed within moments, with a minimum of discussion, on what they were going to do.

"It'll be a big help if you can show me the way down," Maria had said, almost by way of greeting, staring into the gloom below. Mountain-sized buttes made purple shadow-shapes down there, beyond a miles-deep band of sunken clouds and snow-showers. "Down to where I have to go. That will save me valuable time."

"So," Cathy had said. "They've given you the job of keeping an eye on me."

Maria had frowned, as if she were troubled by some distant memory. "No," she had said slowly. "Maybe I'm supposed to be doing that, and maybe Joe thinks I am, but I'm not. No, my reason for going down is personal. This is extremely important to me."

"All right," Cathy had said, disbelieving. "Whatever you say, however you want to come along, for the private detectives or just for fun. How you get there is supposed to be this damned big secret, you know. A secret I wasn't supposed to remember, but I did anyway. To hell with them and their secrets. My parents, I mean. Whatever they did to me when I was a kid. I don't quite know yet what it was, but I'm going to find out."

Maria had said nothing. She had been staring into the depths, apparently at something far, far beyond the afternoon's returning convoy of mule-mounted tourists, who were just coming into view in the middle distance, ghostly centaurs climbing out of snow and time.

Cathy had started down the trail.

"This time," Cathy said now, "I left a note for Aunt Sarah. She's a good lady. No use worrying her unnecessarily."

"Maybe you shouldn't have done that," Maria said.

"Left a note? Why not?"

Maria didn't know why not; she couldn't say, and only gestured vaguely. But somehow the thought of Cathy's note made her uneasy.

"You see," said Cathy, "going down the first time, I mean at Thanksgiving, that was a lot different. I didn't really know where I was headed, then. I only had a kind of memory." She paused. "Do you ever have—dreams—about your early childhood?"

"Not any more," Maria said.

"Memories, I should say. More like memories than dreams. Going down that time was like a dream. I saw things, real things, that I had convinced myself were only figments of my imagination. Like a certain little house. Seeing that house scared me, so I just—went camping for a while. Now I've got to go back and make sure about things, like that house, and my parents. I…" Cathy did not seem to be able to find words to complete the thought.

"You work with Mr. Strangeways?" she asked finally. "No," said Maria, in her new vague, indifferent voice. "Not really. I've barely met him. Why?"

"There's something spooky about him."

"I think you're probably right about that." The two young women trudged on down the trail.

They had gone no more than fifty yards when Cathy noticed that Maria was carrying nothing—not even a canteen—in the way of camping supplies or equipment.

"Aren't you going to need anything?"

"No. I'm not really—going that far." Maria was staring straight ahead of her, as if she were thinking very intently indeed. Cathy almost hesitated to interrupt such concentration.

"You're following me, right? Checking up on me? So how do you know how far I'm going?"

Maria shrugged.

"Well, you're all right." Cathy shook her head, tossing her hair. "You're not going to need a canteen, because it isn't very far."

"How do we get there?"

"You have to know a secret. But that's all right, I remember the secret. Or else I'm crazy, and I've only been imagining things all along."

"What kind of secret?"

"It's a trick my father—the man who must have been my real father—taught me when I was very small. For a long time I forgot it; but once you learn something important like that, it's never quite forgotten. You know what I mean? Like riding a bicycle."

Maria didn't answer. She was still gazing straight ahead of her as she walked, as if her thoughts were really elsewhere.

Snow blew in the faces of the two young women, and flurries obscured the trail, above them and below. The mule train, mounting methodically, led by a mounted ranger, came into view once more, this time immediately ahead. Cathy and Maria moved as far as possible to the inside edge of the trail, letting the big, sure-footed animals walk past, each carrying a half-frozen tourist. The mounted men and women, at this stage of their adventure intent on getting back to warmth and civilization, scarcely glanced at the waiting hikers.

The trick that Cathy had mentioned, of course, was a technique required of any traveler bound in or out of the place her parents had called the Deep Canyon. The proper technique was essential, not only to pass the barrier of time, but to arrive on the other side of that barrier somewhere near your chosen destination. It was of course necessary that the destination had been rightly chosen—and for Cathy, as she herself now thought, this journey of exploration, of rediscovery, was not only right, but inevitable.

She tried, without much success, to discuss all these things with Maria, as the two young women continued walking down Bright Angel Trail together.

Maria at last paid enough attention to say: "It's all new to me down here. You'll have to show me."

"Oh, I can show you easily enough. When I was a little girl, I came down this way more times than I can remember—than I could remember. But now I'm here again, it's all coming back."

Now the two were alone, cut off on all sides by the falling snow that had driven other visitors to cover. Cathy as she descended the trail pondered yet again the questions of her own origins: Who had her real mother been? Somehow she was almost entirely certain that her real mother, whatever her identity, had been dead for a long time. And who, really, was the man that she rememberedas the father of her childhood?

Gradually, in the course of growing up as Brainard's adopted daughter, Cathy had come to realize that her adoption had made her a relative of old Edgar Tyrrell, an important but vastly eccentric artist who in the dim past of the thirties had built the Tyrrell House, among his other achievements. But until very recently Tyrrell and his ancient affairs had never loomed large in Cathy Brainard's thoughts. She had never had any cause to connect the half-famous artist, whose name appeared on statues, in books, and in museums, with the vague memory she nursed of her 'real' father. The dates were just hopelessly wrong, to begin with.

Nor, until Cathy arrived by chance at the Canyon this year, at the age of seventeen, had she ever had any reason, or any desire, to visit the house on the South Rim.

Cathy was vaguely aware that her adoptive father sometimes visited the Canyon on business trips—though Brainard seldom discussed business in front of her. But people at home almost never talked about the Tyrrell House in her presence, and she had had no idea that she had ever been there before.

Until she saw the place. Then, at first glance, she was certain that it had once been her home.

Cathy, absorbed in thought, almost passed up the turning when they reached it, almost missed the proper place to work the trick. But she did recognize the place in time, despite the snow. The two young women turned off Bright Angel, following what looked like a deer trail, leading nowhere. But Cathy made the turnoff without hesitation.

In Cathy's awareness there had been floating the memory of certain old photographs of Edgar Tyrrell, pictures she had come across from time to time, in magazines or books. She was certain of having seen at least one such photo, framed, in the Rim House, and it seemed to her there had been another in one of the Canyon guidebooks she and her girlfriends had seen in the early stage of her Thanksgiving visit, in their room at one of the lodges.

And at Aunt Sarah's home on Long Island, Cathy knew, the old lady still kept one or two such photos, black and white, taken with a boxy old thirties camera. On rainy childhood afternoons young Cathy, browsing through a past in which she had never thought to find herself a native, had come across those pictures more than once. Somehow those pictures had become confused—or so she had long thought—with her real memories, of a real man she once had called her father.

The snow inside the Canyon stopped falling, and the air warmed. The sky remained cloudy, but the quality of light changed, suggesting dusk in the Deep Canyon, but no longer suggesting winter. Visibility increased.

"Yes, this is the place," said Cathy quietly. They were in some kind of a side canyon now, vastly smaller than the big one. A creek, narrow enough to step across, came gurgling down the middle. The narrow trail, or path, generally following the creek, took the young women in single file around some dwarfish cottonwoods. They had arrived in sight of the cottage, which stood only fifty yards or so ahead. Its windows were lightless, and the whole place looked uninhabited and uninviting.

Cathy stopped in her tracks, gazing at the little structure. Maria halted uncertainly beside her.

"I lived in that house once," Cathy said. "Not for very long, I think. But I did live there."

She glanced at Maria, who, silent and dreamy-eyed, was obviously thinking her own thoughts, not paying much attention to her companion or to the cottage.

A strange way for a detective to act, Cathy thought. But Cathy was concentrating on her own thoughts too. She added aloud: "I bet my father still lives here, maybe not in the house but somewhere nearby. I have that feeling."

That caught Maria's interest at least faintly. "Your father? Gerald Brainard?"

"Not him." Now Cathy sounded contemptuous. "My real father. The one I remember from when I was a little girl."

Slowly the two young women approached the silent cottage. A faint steady roar in the background, half-smothered by the noise of the stream, suggested some kind of machinery at work.

"How long since you've seen him?" Maria asked. She appeared to be trying to pull herself out of her apathy, struggling against the half-awake feeling and behavior that had claimed her all the way down.

"It must be about twelve years," said Cathy. She frowned, having made an unsatisfactory mental calculation. "And my great-aunt Sarah might have lived here too—but that would have been more like fifty years ago. No, maybe even sixty."

Lately Cathy had found it almost impossible to make anything satisfactory regarding time. Two days of her Thanksgiving trip had turned somehow into a month; at least, everyone else agreed that she had been gone a month, though on her personal time scale the camping trip could have lasted no more than a couple of days.

Nearing the cottage, Cathy and Maria were accosted by a large calico cat, looking no more than half domesticated. The creature sat in the narrow path before them, mewing as if demanding something; then it darted away into the sparse shrubbery as they approached.

"It's Beagle," breathed Cathy in an awed voice.

"Beagle?"

"That's his name. He was my own pet kitten once. Or a cat that I remember as looking just like that one. My father got it for me. I remember wanting a kitten, and wanting one so much, and I think I remember telling my father… a cat can live twelve years, can't it?"

"Sure. I think so."

When the visitors reached the door of the cottage, Cathy tried the latch and found it open. There was no other lock. She started to go in.

Maria took a step back. "Are you sure this is all right?"

"Of course it is. I live here."

"But you don't any more." Maria raised her hands, rubbed her eyes, shook her head, and looked about her. "What am I doing here? Where are we, anyway?"

But Cathy had already disappeared into the darkness inside the little house.

There were electric lights, in the main room at least, and Cathy knew where to find the switch.

"Just like I remember it," she murmured, looking around the large room. "Except that everything's so small. I seem to remember even the furniture. This chair—" She dragged a hand across the rough-carved wooden back.

Maria was looking out one of the windows into gathering dusk. She said: "Someone's coming."

Cathy turned. The man, dressed in dusty workman's clothes and looking calmly angry, was already standing in the door. His was the righteous look of a homeowner confronting unexpected intruders.

"Father?" The word burst from Cathy at once, impulsively. "Then you are still alive!"

The man's face was changed, scarred and darkened, from the face that she remembered. But in her mind there could be no doubt.

The man in the doorway froze into position for a long moment. Then he glanced briefly at Maria, before fastening a penetrating gaze on Cathy. His face now betrayed little or nothing of what he might be feeling.

He asked, in a rasping voice: "Who are you?"

It was as if Cathy did not even hear the question. She stood where she was, her hands on the back of one of the wooden chairs, gazing back at him. "Daddy?"

"My God—is it possible?" Still staring at her, the man stepped forward, groping for the nearest chair. When he had it in hand he pulled it to him and sat down. His sitting was a sudden movement, as if his knees were no longer to be trusted.

He said, slowly: "What do you call me?"

"You are my father, aren't you? You must be. I can remember you—and I remember this house." She looked around her. She looked back at him. "I lived here, once."

"What's your name, girl?" It was an old, old voice.

"I'm Cathy. Don't you know me? I can remember you as if it were yesterday. You haven't changed—not much."

"Cathy. For a moment I thought that you were young Sarah, somehow finding her way back to me. It's a wonder—a marvel—how much you resemble your mother."

At once, as if the question could be held back no longer, the girl demanded: "Why did you desert me and my mother?"

"Desert you? I?"

"She left me in an orphanage, when I was four or five years old. That much I know. She wouldn't have had to do that, if you hadn't deserted her. Am I mistaken?" Cathy seemed anxious to be told that she was.

Edgar Tyrrell drew himself up straight in his chair. "I deserted her? And abandoned you? Who told you that?"

"It seems obvious. Am I mistaken? I can remember the two of you quarreling. Up on the rim, the day—someone—was being buried."

The man in the chair looked old. After a moment he said: "Your sister was buried up there. I'm surprised you can remember that." He shook his head slowly. "After that, your mother walked out on me. She blamed me, somehow. She took you with her and walked out on me one bright day, without warning. And she never came back."

After a pause Cathy asked: "What was she like? My mother?"

"In her youth, you mean? You speak of her—in the past tense."

Cathy stared at him. "She's dead!"

Old Tyrrell stared back. Then he looked about the room, remembered something, and in an instant was on his feet, in a fluid movement that belied his look of age.

"Where is your companion?" he demanded sharply.

Cathy needed a moment to understand. "Maria? I don't know. She was right here a moment ago."

Tyrrell stood listening, in concentration. "It doesn't matter," he said at last. "She will not have got far. She doesn't matter." His gaze fixed on Cathy again. "You matter, though."

"Father?" Cathy, letting go of her chair, came toward him, at first tentatively, then in a little rush that ended in an awkward embrace. Tyrrell's arms, at first raised as if to ward her off, closed about her slowly, gently.

"You are my father," she said against his shoulder.

Gently and slowly he disengaged to hold her at arm's length.

"I am—I was—your stepfather, child. When I first saw you, you were perhaps two years old. Your sister was a babe in arms. Your mother was—or is—the only woman—perhaps the only person—I have ever truly loved. You—and your sister—were the only children I could ever have. Therefore you matter to me. And you always will."

He added gently, "You told me just now that your mother was dead?"

"My real mother? She's been dead since I was six." Cathy paused, suspicion being born. "Hasn't she?"

Tyrrell ignored the question for the moment. "When did you leave the Rim, in what year? And how did you get here, into the Deep Canyon? The way should not be open."

"The way was open for me," Cathy said simply. "Because I lived here once, I remembered how to find the turning. I came looking for you."

"What year? Tell me, what year?"

"I don't know what you mean. This year? This year is nineteen ninety-one."

"Ah," the man said.

Moving past him to the open door, looking out into the gathering night, the young woman sampled the air, the strangeness of the place, with a deep breath. Smells strange and familiar at the same time, unknown since childhood, keyed into her memory.

She said: "I could always remember this place—very much like this. Except now the house and everything seems so much smaller. But when I remembered these things I thought my memory was playing tricks on me. There were other things, too, that didn't seem to fit. Cars, and radios, that I gradually realized looked like they were from the thirties. Old-fashioned clothes and toys. When things like that puzzled me, I always thought my memory was playing tricks."

She looked at her companion closely. "And there were even stranger things. Things that I saw you do, or seem to do, that would have been impossible for anyone."

"My dear…"

Cathy indicated with a gesture that she had not finished. "Not only my memory," she added. "People have been lying to me all my life. I didn't know if this place was real. When I tried to talk about it, no one would pay attention. My mother abandoned me in an orphanage, and you, my father, never tried to find me—did you?"

"No," the man said, after a silence, "because I came to realize that your mother was right to take you away from here."

"Why was she right?"

"It was a dangerous place for you. I realize that now."

"Now you live here all alone?"

Tyrrell looked faintly surprised. "Alone? No, far from alone."

The girl asked: "What year did she leave you?"

"Who?"

She stared at him. "My mother!"

"Nineteen thirty-four."

"Nineteen thirty-four?" A moment of mental calculation. "That isn't possible!"

"Ah, but it is."

"No. It's the time, you see—Father. You're saying that Mother left you in nineteen thirty-four. But I'm only seventeen. How could I possibly be…?"

"My whole life is a question of time, Cathy. Time does not run smoothly for me. Nor does it for anyone who lives in the Deep Canyon—as you did. It's as if there were rapids in the flow. Like those in the river, you see—do you remember my showing you the river?"

"I remember—the river. Yes!"

"And I must have shown you the white rocks? The rocks as old as the earth, that make big rapids in the flow of time? I have spent my life at work upon those rocks—the spirit of the earth is in them."

Cathy cared little about rocks. "Father—it was Aunt Sarah, my grandaunt, who left you in nineteen thirty-four."

"It was Sarah, your mother, who left me—ah, I begin to understand."

"But—how could—"

Tyrrell walked to the bedroom door. "Come here, girl. Let me show you something."

A minute later the two of them were in the room that had been briefly hers in her young childhood. Entering, the man touched a switch beside the door. A lamp came on.

"I don't remember there being an electric light."

"I put that in a few years after you were gone. There was some—trouble with the kerosene lamps."

Reaching into the closet, Tyrrell took down the stuffed animal and showed it to Cathy.

"Do you remember this, daughter?"

"Yes, yes!"

"And this?" He set the childish lunch box in front of her. "I brought this down from the Rim, for you, at your special request. It was something you remembered from the world outside, before you came here. And you wanted one, I don't know why." He paused. "Perhaps you still had hopes of going to school one day. Well, I suppose you've managed to do that."

"Yes, I've gone to school. I don't know either—Father—why I wanted the lunch box. But it seems to me I remember that I did."

"And this." Now he was opening a very different metal box, also taken from the closet. "I believe your birth certificate is still in here somewhere."

In a moment he had brought out an old paper. The folds in the document were stiff with age.

"Dated May eighteenth, you see, nineteen thirty. Your mother had it with her, for some reason, when she came here."

Cathy looked at the paper. " 'Catherine Ann Young,' " she read aloud, wonderingly.

"That's you. Sarah's maiden name was Young. She was never married, you see, to your biological father. She must have loved him, of course, to have two children by him. Perhaps he was a married man. I never asked her much about her past. I was content to have her as she was." He paused. "More than content."

"But I can't believe this." Cathy was shaking her head. "This would mean that there were years—decades, out of the middle of this century—when I didn't exist at all."

"You might also reflect that you were also absent from existence during the entire nineteenth century—and for a good many centuries, millennia, geological ages, before that."

"Of course, but—it's so strange."

"I doubt, my dear, that your life is any stranger than my own." Tyrrell took thought, and hesitated. "Well, perhaps it is, in some details. But I also doubt that either yours or mine is the strangest human life that anyone has ever lived." He smiled. "Of course, neither of us have quite run our full course yet, have we?"

The birth certificate was marked by two tiny baby footprints in black ink, showing a left foot and a right.

"Those prints would match yours," said Tyrrell gently. "My dear, you were born more than sixty years ago. Evidently in California, as it says. Your mother can tell you the details, I'm sure."

"My mother. Then Sarah is my mother."

"Indeed she is. I'll see that you get back to her safely."

Cathy's eyes closed as she stood over the little table, and for a moment she looked faint.

Then she reached out, groped for her father and gave him a tighter hug than before.

Again he responded awkwardly.

Releasing him, she looked around. "I wonder where Maria's got to?"

"I must go to the cave," Tyrrell said suddenly, as if the question about Maria had reminded him of something. "It will be safer for you if you come with me, rather than waiting here."

"Safer?"

"The Deep Canyon is a dangerous place to visit, girl. You have been lucky, so far. And when you were a child, you were well protected. Your baby sister—was not so fortunate. And for that your mother blamed me." His voice had dropped to a kind of whisper. "Come with me. If your companion is important to you—perhaps we can still help her as well."

"Help her? What's the matter?"

"Come with me. Now."

On reaching the entrance to the work-cave, Cathy paused just inside. "I remember this place," she whispered. "It's where you worked. My mother would tell me: 'Daddy's working.' And I would come to the doorway and look in here—at the darkness."

"I still work here, daughter." Tyrrell stood with his head turned slightly, listening carefully. "Your companion is not here now." He turned on the lights.

"What do you work on, Father?"

"On the lifeblood of our planet, my dear. On life and death. On the ways that the two can come together. You see, neither can exist without the other."

"Father? What's happened to you?" Here in the cave's harsh electric lights, she could see how the old man's face showed scars. What must once have been hideous burn marks had healed and softened with time, leaving little more than a suggestion of what must once have been disaster.

"What are those scars?" Cathy repeated. "I don't remember them."

'Someone attempted to kill me." Her father turned from his workbench to answer tersely. "Actually, they wanted to burn me to death."

His look softened when he saw his daughter's reaction.

"It doesn't matter now," he assured her. "They failed. And that was a long time ago. Here, here are the rocks I work on. Not the silly things I carve from ordinary stone, for Brainard to sell. I gave up most of that sort of work a long time ago."

Tyrrell broke off, listening. He looked at Cathy, and his face grew worried. Moments passed before she could hear what he heard, approaching voices, sounding like those of two women and a man.