A Question of Time

Chapter 5

Bill Burdon was standing just where he had been posted, close beside a gnarled juniper, just a few yards down into the Canyon from the lowest level of the Tyrrell House. In his carefully chosen position the small tree shadowed him from the moon as well as from the nearer lights up on the Rim, while a long section of the nearby trail lay exposed in moonlight for his inspection. He doubted very much that anyone approaching the Tyrrell House from below by any route would be able to see him, or get past him without being seen.

Bill, who considered himself good at this kind of thing, had no trouble remaining patient and keeping quiet. At intervals he changed position. When he went so far as to sit down, very carefully, on the ground, he congratulated himself on managing the movement without making a sound.

It looked like he was in for a long, dull night, with no reason to really expect any action. Joe had told him he'd be relieved in a few hours, but Bill was already beginning to wonder if he was going to find it a problem to keep awake.

To keep alert, Bill turned over in his mind the distinguishing features of the case. He had to admit that perhaps number one was that here was an old lady with lots of money, one of her relatives missing and another one nervous, and if she wanted to spend some of her wealth hiring detectives, it wasn't the detectives' business to discourage her.

Distinguishing feature number two might be that old Sarah Tyrrell really seemed to think that some kind of psychic connection existed between her and her grand-niece, and that young Cathy stood in some kind of occult peril. That led Bill to wonder why anyone should accept ordinary-looking Joe Keogh from Chicago as an expert in the field of solving psychic mysteries. It was more than Bill could understand. Joe didn't seem at all the type—

Bill heard a faint sound. Some thirty yards down-slope from where he sat, something of roughly human size was moving. Bill's right arm raised his dark flashlight, thumb resting on the switch that would turn it on. Presently a middle-sized mule deer came far enough out into the moonlight to let Bill see its big ears cupped in his direction. A moment later, the animal was gone down-slope again, even more quietly than it had come.

Bill lowered the light, still unused. All right, back to the case. Another of its peculiarities, at least in Bill Burdon's admittedly inexperienced opinion, was Mr. Strangeways, who certainly had something odd about him. This peculiarity was hard to define, but Bill wouldn't have especially related it to the occult. Well, Keogh had given his temporary employees fair warning that he wasn't necessarily going to tell them everything about how he ran his business. And in the business of security and investigations, Bill had already learned, you had to expect to meet odd people.

There was another faint sound, this time from the direction of the house. A moment later, Bill saw and heard Joe reemerge from his conference, descending the wooden ladder. After waving silently in the direction of Bill, whose shadowed and motionless form was probably invisible to him, Joe Keogh returned to his own post on the other side of the faint descending path.

A minute later, another faint noise came, downslope somewhere—to Bill this one sounded like an owl. Trying to pierce the darkness with his vision, Bill noticed that the fog had now sunk deeper into the Canyon, so that an eerie moonlit landscape fell away from him on a steep overall descent. The moonlight was just bright enough to suggest the overall outline of the fantastic terrain, while leaving almost everything but the largest features to the imagination. Bill had identified the deer at a distance of thirty yards, but much beyond that he thought it would be impossible to distinguish animal from human.

He hoped that the remaining high clouds were going to let the moon—tonight not quite half full—show him a good deal more of the Canyon. But so far the visibility hadn't yet improved enough to give grounds for real hope along those lines.

Time passed.

Bill was wearing a watch, but he couldn't see the dial in the dark, and he wasn't about to use his flashlight for that purpose. The movement of the moon across the sky would let him estimate time's passage accurately enough to satisfy his own curiosity.

Another hour or so had passed, and it was beginning to seem to Bill, at least, that things were likely to remain quiet all night, when the next sound came. This time it came from the direction of the house, and this time there was no doubt that it meant trouble.

A crash of glass was blended with yells in several different voices. Then Bill heard heavier impacts, like a hammer pounding on boards or logs. Additional shouts and bangings followed.

In the midst of the uproar there sounded a single gunshot.

Looking toward the house, shrouded as it was in gloom except for faint lamplight at a couple of windows, Bill could see nothing out of the ordinary.

For the moment, not seeing anything else to do, he stood his ground.

Maria, who had been still faithfully keeping the client company, saw a moving light behind the window curtain. Then in the next moment the light—it had to be only some kind of strange reflection—was actually in the room with her.

Old Sarah, who a moment ago had been asleep, was sitting bolt upright in her bed.

Maria saw—and then forgot that she had seen—the figure of a man, standing close in front of her. And then, for the time being, she saw and heard no more.

Joe Keogh, when the uproar broke upon the quiet night, started to rush for the ladder to get back up into the house, but then remembered that the trapdoor should still be locked or latched on the inside. Slowly he retreated to his original position, watching and listening.

Bill stood for a long moment indecisive, half in and half out of moonlight now, on the verge of charging back up to the house, in the name of doing something. But then the thought of the locked trapdoor passed through Bill's mind as it had through Joe's. Following it was the sudden suspicion that all this noise might be meant as a distraction, to draw him away from the place where he had been posted.

But before this state of indecision had endured for more than a second or two, Bill's attention was drawn from the house, by the sight of first one strange figure and then another, striding downhill as if they had just come from Tyrrell's old dwelling. Both figures were moving so swiftly and unexpectedly that both were past Bill before he could react in any purposeful way.

A moment later Bill, reacting instinctively, had started in pursuit. Pulling out his flashlight, he turned it on, and in the same instant cried out for the two to halt. His shout had no visible effect.

Even in the excitement of the moment it struck him as unsettling that his quarry, the figures of someone—or something—at least generally, vaguely human—were eerily not really running, but rather striding away from him, moving at the speed of runners, gliding downhill, departing untouched into the invisible depths of the Canyon.

They were escaping, scot-free, after making a mockery of Bill's and his colleagues' efforts to protect their client.

Worse than defeat was insult. There was something indefinably daunting about the figures Bill had glimpsed—about that first one in particular—but he was a brave young man and did not hesitate, at least not more than momentarily, to pursue.

His flashlight now failed to reveal anything of the foremost figure that fled from him down the slope—that appeared to have already vanished—but the beam afforded him one fairly clear look at the rearmost, who had paused momentarily. In Bill's sight this took the form of a man, a total stranger as far as he could tell—gray-haired, and dressed in gray work clothing. Bill yelled at this man to halt.

The gray-haired man paid not the least attention, but strode on, resuming his effortless Olympic pace.

Bill, running now at something like full speed, started to give chase in earnest.

Joe Keogh had been able to catch only a fleeting glimpse of the same two figures. To him they were extremely ominous, but in the next moment he saw something that scared him more—Bill, plunging heedlessly down the trail after them.

Joe yelled for Bill to stop.

If Bill heard Joe's command, he paid no more attention to it than Bill's quarry had to his.

Joe, drawing in breath to yell again, started in full-speed pursuit also.

But before he could shout Bill's name a second time, or run more than a few yards, Joe tripped and stumbled on the rough and unfamiliar trail. A numbing shock shot through his ankle, sudden forewarning of agony about to come. Joe fell, hardly aware of the impact of rock and dirt beneath his hands, scraping palms and fingers painfully on tough brush and unyielding rock.

Heedlessly wasting what little breath he still retained on useless oaths, Joe struggled to his feet and tried to resume his run. One attempted step on his right leg was all he needed to convince him that he was through running for the night. He collapsed again, with a groan of pain.

Meanwhile John Southerland, dutifully holding his assigned post at the front of the house, heard some disturbance inside, or, as he thought, at the rear. There was a crash of glass and other violent noise, accompanied by yells in several voices.

John crouched slightly, alternating his attention between the house and the approaches to it, from which the last tourist had disappeared more than an hour ago. He refused to let himself be drawn away from his post. The disturbance was quite possibly a planned distraction.

Gradually Maria became aware that Gerald Brainard, trembling and muttering, carrying a heavy revolver in hand, was standing beside her chair, in the room next to where old Sarah was still sitting upright in the bed.

"They're gone now. It's all over," said Brainard in a husky voice. Maria thought that he looked curiously relieved.

Maria's radio was buzzing on the little table beside her chair, and she groped to answer it.

Outside, Joe, sitting helplessly on the ground, was using his own radio to call for help.

John Southerland, getting the call, at last did leave his post, moving decisively. With flashlight in hand he went running around the house and downhill to the place from which Joe was calling for help.

John relaxed somewhat when the beam of his flashlight showed him his brother-in-law sitting on a rock, swearing too loudly for a man with a mortal injury.

"Help me up, goddam it!"

"Where you hurt?"

"My ankle."

John grabbed the older man under the arms and hoisted. "Where's Bill?" he asked, looking around.

"Went chasing off downhill like a damn fool." Joe balanced on one foot, leaning half his weight on John's shoulder. "After those… I tried to stop him—no, don't you go running after him."

"He went chasing after…?" John didn't complete the question; he could already read the answer in Joe's frightened eyes.

For the next couple of minutes they both tried, with no success, to get Bill on the radio.

"Help me back to the house," Joe growled at last. "What's going on in there?"

"I haven't looked. Maria sounded like she had things under control—still there, Maria?"

"Still here," her voice responded after a moment. "If you guys are coming in, I'll open the trapdoor."

Getting the injured man up the ladder was difficult, but with Maria tugging from above and John pushing from below the task proved not impossible. Joe's adrenaline was up, and his arms were strong enough to hoist his weight repeatedly.

Brainard and Sarah came to meet the investigators in the lowest level of the house.

Of those present, no one but Joe had been hurt.

"Did I hear shots?" he demanded.

No one answered that directly.

"I thought I heard one," said Maria. "And Mr. Brainard here was carrying a pistol. Also there's a small hole in one of the windows."

"All right, we'll deal with that later." For a moment Joe stared at Brainard, who looked back numbly. "Maria, try again to get Bill on the radio. John, get me up the stairway to the main floor, can you?"

While John was helping the boss upstairs, Maria tried her radio. "This is the house," she kept saying. "Bill, is that you? Come in."

Only noise responded.

Joe, hobbling now through the middle level of the house, leaning on furniture, muttered something to the effect that the radios were expensive junk.

"They always worked great before," John commented.

And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Bill's voice was coming clearly through the little unit in Maria's hand. Some of the words were unclear, half-drowned in noise, but the burden of Bill's message seemed to be that he had managed to get himself lost, or at least bewildered; he was going to have to sit tight until daylight.

Joe, at the head of a stairway, looking down at Maria at the foot, let out a sigh of relief. He nodded at her.

"Sit tight, then," she told Bill. "Anything you need?" Bill did not answer. Joe shook his head and muttered.

Maria was left with the puzzling feeling that she had fainted during the excitement; but no, she couldn't have done that. She had been sleeping when it started, that was it. Noise had awakened her, and lights at the windows, and then… Brainard, standing over her with gun in hand.

She had the nagging feeling that there had been something else. But just exactly what…

Neither the client nor her nephew, thought Maria, puzzling, were as outraged as she would have expected clients to be under the circumstances. At first old Sarah had been, naturally enough, somewhat stunned by the intrusion, but now she appeared much calmer. Neither she nor Brainard wanted to call in the Park Rangers, who served as the police here on this federal land. She, Maria, would certainly have been outraged if she had hired a private security force at great expense, and her new employees had failed her dismally within a few hours of going on the job.

Joe established himself for the time being in a chair on the highest level of the house. Maria suggested tentatively that she and John try searching downhill for Bill in darkness; or they could at least try shining flashlights in that direction, so their missing colleague might have a beacon that could guide him home.

Joe fiercely forbade any attempt to search, and proclaimed that shining lights anywhere would be a waste of time.

"But there's no use his just sitting there on a rock all night if he doesn't have to. If we could just show a bright light—"

"Sit down and shut up." Joe Keogh's gaze for once was icy. "I know what I'm doing. I'm not sending any more people down that hill tonight. Our client is up here."

"Okay." Maria wondered silently why the boss was so vehement. Well, some people got that way after they had screwed things up.

All of them gradually became aware that Brainard seemed much more at ease now than he had been before the mysterious visitation. Now he was going out of his way to be friendly with the hired investigators, offering to get them coffee or hot chocolate from the kitchen.

Sarah Tyrrell on the other hand, after a few minutes of apparently peaceful contemplation, had resumed worrying. She had retreated to her bedroom, where she sat in a rocker, tense, staring into space, saying little. The old lady seemed still to welcome the presence of Maria, who tried to comfort her.

John and Joe also remained in the Tyrrell House for another couple of hours. The two men took turns, one dozing in a chair while the other remained awake, listening for any further radio communication from Bill. A light was kept burning in one of the northern windows of the house.

But Bill's radio remained silent, despite the fact that they tried several times to call him back.