A Question of Time

Chapter 18

In the bright sunlight of midafternoon Jake stood, momentarily immobilized by the screams that poured out from behind the chipped and blasted but still solid barrier of rock. The man Jake was trying to kill obviously still survived.

Camilla, standing beside her breathing lover, had covered her ears with her hands, but now she added scream after scream of her own to Edgar's.

Anger brought Jake out of his momentary paralysis. He slapped Camilla viciously, trying to knock her out of her hysteria.

A moment later she was clinging to him, sobbing, and he was trying to comfort her. Then he grabbed her by the arms and shook her. Almost shouting to make himself heard above Edgar's cries of agony, he commanded: "We've got to try the dynamite again. We've got to finish him off."

Camilla shuddered. "I know, I know—I'm all right now."

Already Jake had picked up his hammer and drill again; the only practical hope was another attempt at blasting. He still had dynamite, and wire, and blasting caps.

Camilla had an inspiration. "We forgot about the kerosene in the lamps in the house. I can get that."

"Good idea. Throw the lamps back there. Keep that fire burning."

She ran off.

Hastily Jake ran his hands over the barrier rock, selecting the spots where he wanted to drill the next set of holes. In a few moments he had begun hammering again. The failure of his first attempt had made him more keenly aware than ever that he didn't really know what he was doing when it came to blasting rock.

In a couple of minutes Camilla was back, walking now, carefully carrying three kerosene lamps. She hurled these accurately, one at a time, the glass bowls shattering inside the cave. The fresh shower of flammable liquid made the black smoke pour forth with increased volume.

Then she came to help Jake. "It'll go faster if I hold the drill."

"Yeah."

She gripped the steel tool, rotating it after each blow as she had seen Jake do. Jake switched to a bigger hammer, as he had before. A slowly growing frenzy of fear and horror fueled him with energy. The work went faster.

When Jake and Camilla prepared to start the second new hole, he happened to look back into the little cave. What had been a deeply shadowed recess was now well lit by flames. To Jake's horror, he was able to see a portion of Tyrrell's head, scorched gray hair and blackened skin, at about knee level. The old man in his torment must somehow have managed to pull himself up on hands and knees.

Black smoke obscured at least half of what the orange flames were trying to reveal, but still Jake could see that Tyrrell's clothing was largely burned away, at least around his neck and shoulders, and the vampire was looking out at his assailants. His eyes, set in the scorched ruin of his face, were glassy and staring. His blackened lips writhed, uttering strange sounds.

On Jake's next swing his hammer missed the drill completely, fortunately missing Camilla's hands as well. She yelled at him in fright and dropped the tool.

Jake bellowed back at her, and she picked up the drill again.

Then suddenly it was all too much for her. Screaming, she dropped the tool clanging on rock and started to run, heading down the side canyon in the direction of the river.

Jake's shout of desperation—"Cam, get back here! I can't do this alone!"—stopped her in her tracks.

Quivering, she came back. But then she slumped weakly to the ground, unable or unwilling to do any more.

Again he gripped the drill in his own left hand, though both his arms were trembling with fatigue. Again he swung the smaller hammer with his right.

The drilling progressed, slowly. Time passed. Tyrrell’s screams slowly subsided into hideous moans, as the fire in the recess burned itself out, the black smoke diminishing to a greasy trickle in the air. Jake could not believe that the moans were ever going to stop.

Slowly, slowly, the last hole that Jake would have time to drill deepened in the limestone. Somehow the sun had passed the zenith and was going down. Despite oddness of the way time was passing, and the urgency of passing time, he had to pause frequently to rest his arms.

He didn't look into the cave again, but with the wind blowing the last traces of smoke away he knew that now the fire was out. Whatever damage the burning kerosene was capable of doing had been done, and their enemy had somehow survived it.

"Jake, I'm sorry, lover. I'll help you now, I'll help."

Camilla had pulled herself together and come to stand beside him.

Jake nodded and smiled, saving his breath for work. He put down his hammer for a moment, leaning against the barrier rock to rest, wiping sweat from his forehead, and from his face, long days unshaven, with the sleeve of his work shirt.

Camilla came to give him an embrace.

Without warning, Tyrrell's scorched hand came groping out of the recess. The thin limb struck like a black snake wearing the ashen remnants of a sleeve, the arm extending itself unbelievably far. The grab missed Jake's arm by a fraction of an inch, and caught Camilla by the collar of her shirt.

Jake let out an incoherent sound of horror, dropped his hammer and jumped back. But the vampire's groping hand had now fastened on Camilla—she was being dragged helplessly into the small aperture between two unyielding surfaces of rock. The sound she made now was less a scream than a prolonged sob.

Jake stepped forward again. He picked up the metal drill, half as long as a baseball bat, and heavier, and swung it directly against Tyrrels almost skeletal wrist—to no effect. The sensation of impact that traveled back up the drill and into Jake's own hands was as if he had struck the massive rock itself. The blackened hand did not release its grip.

Camilla's body was braced, all her muscles straining as she struggled to keep herself from being forced, crushed, into the narrow aperture. Her sobbing made coherent words: "No, Jake, use wood! Use wood!"

Jake dropped the drill. He grabbed up the longest hammer, and tried pounding with the handle at Tyrrell's arm. When that had no effect he changed his tactics, using the handle like a lever, jamming it into the narrow crevice between rocks, making a fulcrum of one angle of the big rock slab. With all his strength he forced Tyrrell's burned wrist against another rock.

Once more, the man in the cave screamed horribly.

His blackened, bony fingers still refused to release Camilla's collar, but now the fabric of the shirt was ripping.

Part of the garment, collar and shoulder and sleeve, tore completely away. With a final cry, as if she might be dying, the young woman fell to the ground, out of the vampire's reach.

Jake grabbed her under the arms, pulled her even farther from the blackened arm that still groped in search of breathing flesh.

"Come on, Cam, we're not done yet. Come on, you've still got to help me. We still have to drill another hole." It would have to be done, obviously, in a place where Tyrrell could not possibly reach them as they worked.

"All right." Camilla dragged herself back to her feet.

They worked, in a nightmare of heat and exhaustion, in a persistent numbing stench of kerosene, while the treacherous sun slid swiftly down the sky. Sometimes, from the corners of their eyes, they saw one of Tyrrell's ruined arms come groping desperately out again.

There came a time when Jake had to rest. Camilla, now almost wholly recovered as far as he could tell, brought him food while he rested.

At last Jake, measuring with the drill, decided that the final hole was deep enough to hold a charge.

Once more, with shaking fingers, he crimped high explosives and blasting caps together, along with one end of a length of wire.

"Hurry, hurry." Camilla, in a shaking whisper, had begun to chant a litany.

It seemed to Jake that time was going crazy. How could a full day of sunlight have slipped away so quickly?

Shadows were lengthening, the hours of daylight almost gone.

Inside the cave, darkness was firmly re-established, and the man in there had ceased to struggle visibly. He had fallen completely silent.

Eventually, with the two breathers huddled in the same shelter as before, Jake managed to set off a second blast.

Running out from his shelter as before, amid a shower of splintered rock, he needed only a single glance at the barrier to know that he had failed again. Once again a thick slice of the obstacle had been blasted away, but the main bulk still stood. Maybe one more shot would do it. Maybe.

Fatalistically Jake surveyed his tools and blasting materials. Even if he had the stuff for a third blast, which was doubtful, he lacked anything like the time to prepare one.

Dragging Camilla to her feet, he started moving with her, an exhausted shuffle down-canyon in the direction of the river. "Come on," he urged. 'Where, Jake? Where?"

He kept his mouth shut. He didn't want to say anything, for fear that the half-dead thing in the little cave might hear him.

Dragging, half-carrying Camilla with him, Jake made the best time he could, down the trail to the river.

All along he had had in the back of his mind this final try at escape, something to do when all else failed. If they could get to the river there was a chance they might survive the rapids. And now there was a chance that Tyrrell, injured as he was, would not be able to pursue them past that barrier, or could not catch them if he did. If the rapids killed them, well, any quick death would be better than what was coming for them here at sundown.

Leaping freely beside Jake as he stumbled along, too weak to run, the foaming water of the little creek babbled warnings and strange curses.

Camilla at his side seemed to be delirious, or almost, mumbling warnings. The last rays of the day's sun came through a notch in the western cliffs, to burn briefly on her face unnoticed.

Minutes later, with Camilla still at his side, Jake went plunging into the swift icy water of the river that ought to have been the Colorado.

At the last moment, right at the waterline, he seized a large piece of driftwood and dragged it with him. He wasn't a strong swimmer, but the wood allowed him some hope of keeping himself afloat. He tried to call to Camilla to take hold of the log as well, but she was already gone ahead of Jake, disappeared into the torrent.

The sun was now completely down.

The rocks on which the current tore itself to foam were black in the sky's last fading light. These were the deepest rocks of all the layers through which the Colorado cut.

The water was a shock of cold, followed immediately by a greater shock of impact. Lights whirled and flashed before Jake's eyes, and he saw, or imagined that he saw, first one white nodule protruding from a rock, and then a forest of them.

And Jake, in the few moments before the current slammed him even harder against more rocks, was sure that he could hear Tyrrell, released by sunset and howling like a windstorm, coming after him to make sure of his revenge.

But other hands than Tyrrells caught at Jake first, and held him up. Bright light, like colored searchlights reflecting from the river, was all around him.

Whatever happened, Camilla was still with him. He could no longer see her face, but, whatever strange thing was happening to them now, he knew that she was near.