A Question of Time

Chapter 8

As Camilla left the cave with Jake, she tried to keep stalling him, but Jake was no longer to be put off.

"Where is he now, and when'll he be back?"

Camilla sighed. "Right now he's resting, I keep telling you. He'll be back soon as it gets dark; maybe a little before."

"I know you keep telling me that, but resting where?"

"I don't think now's the time to—"

"Where?"

Camilla slumped, giving up. "There's another cave, a smaller one. In the cliff on the other side of this canyon."

"Well then, show me."

With a sigh Camilla took him by the hand. As if she were a child, Jake thought, who needed to hold someone's hand for support. She led Jake across the creek and a little way up the slope on the opposite side.

When she had brought Jake to the new cave where Tyrrell was supposed to sleep, and pointed it out to him, he said nothing for a moment. He looked carefully at Camilla, who seemed perfectly serious. Jake felt his scalp creep. It looked like he might have to face it: maybe she was really crazier even than the old man.

The shallow cave she was pointing out might be big enough to house a sleeping man; but the entrance was almost completely blocked by a single huge block of limestone, a slab weighing tons. A cat might have squeezed past this barrier, but it was obvious that no human being could have done so.

Jake made his voice quiet and reasonable. "No one could get in or out through that little crack. I could hardly put my foot in there. What're you telling me?"

Camilla was unshaken. "I know it looks that way, but he's back there now. Really. He has room enough to get in and out, while the sun is down. The shape of his body changes. I've seen him do it. In daylight he can't get in or out."

"There's another entrance, you mean."

"No, I mean what I said. He comes in and out this way."

Jake paused again, this time for a longer interval, and then he asked: "Look, Camilla, tell me again—how long have you been here with old Edgar?"

She swallowed. "I've lost track. I know it's more'n a year."

"And you haven't been out, away from this place, anywhere, in all that time?"

Starting to weep, she shook her head. "I know how crazy it sounds. I'm about going crazy. But I'm not crazy yet. I'm just trying to tell you the truth about him. You'll see."

The way Camilla was talking at the moment did little to dispel Jake's impression that she was really insane.

"I'm not crazy," she repeated, as if she might be reading his thoughts. "You're the one who's acting loony, if you really want to know. You keep saying you're going to walk back to where you came from, when you know you can't."

Jake swallowed. He said nothing.

Camilla pursued him. "Edgar's right, you are going to stay here." It wasn't at all a question. "You don't have any choice. Any more than I do. Unless we can do something about it."

Jake said a dirty word.

"Honey, you've tried to leave, you've seen for yourself how well that works—just trying to walk away. Am I right?"

Again, Jake didn't answer.

At bottom he knew that she was right. It was crazy, but she was right. But his feelings were mixed up. Despite himself he found the idea of working and living here kind of intriguing, in a kind of crazy way. Sharing Camilla's bed every night would be part of it, and that would be great. But being free to leave was essential.

He said: "You tell me old Edgar sleeps every day, all day."

"That's right."

"What about the days when you go out drawing and painting, like when we first met? You mean he was back here sleeping then? In that—that little hole?"

Camilla hesitated briefly. "Right."

"So you had a chance to get out then, didn't you? But you just sat there on a rock, drawing your pictures, talking to me when I came along. Why didn't you just walk out, if you're so anxious to leave? The way was open that day, right?"

Camilla's answer was quite calm, and came with depressing readiness. "No, the way wasn't open, Jake. Not for me to go out. Only for you to come in."

"I don't get that."

She made a helpless gesture. "It's the way Edgar had things arranged. He can open the doors and close them. He opened a door for you."

"He knew I was coming? You knew?"

"How could either of us have known that? Did you know yourself where you were going when you started out that day on a hike? But he left a door open—so someone could come in."

Jake had to admit that on the day he first met Camilla it was only chance that had brought him hiking down the south bank of the big river, to Deep Canyon. But yesterday you did know I was coming."

"Sure, you told me you'd come back on Sunday."

"Did Edgar know?"

"I—I had to tell him that I'd met you, Jake."

"Was he angry?"

"No. He wanted someone to work for him. Anyway, he doesn't care if I—have a friend. As long as I do what he wants me to do."

"And you're saying he actually wants us both for something more than work."

She nodded silently. Then she burst out: "But I had to bring you anyway. Don't you see, Jake? I needed you, never mind what Edgar wants."

Jake pressed on. "But the first two times I met you, it was in the same place, and I wasn't trapped like this. I could still go back to the camp. I did go back."

"Those first two times you didn't follow me up here to the house. Coming this far up Deep Canyon was what got you in too deep to turn around."

"So. You sucked me into this deliberately. I'm just wanting to make sure."

She nodded slowly. "But I couldn't help myself."

And Camilla cried again. She looked so pitiful that Jake couldn't make himself be rough with her.

Under the circumstances he couldn't bring himself to he tender, either. Not right away. Leaving Camilla weeping on the sofa in the big room of the little house, Jake spent the last hours of daylight roaming up and down the little canyon, never getting more than a hundred yards or so from the house and cave, looking for something. He didn't really know what he was looking for. Anything, anything that might connect this place with the world he knew, the universe in which he'd spent the first twenty-two years of his life.

As sunset drew near, moments of panic came over Jake. He kept feeling caught in a cage whose walls he couldn't even locate with any precision. He'd already looked, reasonably, upstream and down for a reasonable way out. Now he circled the steep amphitheater made by the widening of the side canyon, seeking intently for any way up the walls. Except for the place he'd already climbed, near the waterfall, they looked impossible. He'd have to be desperate to try them, and even if he succeeded, he'd only find himself up on the impossible version of the South Rim again.

He wasn't yet completely desperate. But there were moments when he was getting close.

The sun had disappeared behind the western cliffs, though daylight still held the sky. Jake paused in his restless, almost pointless prowling, still hoping for a sudden insight that might solve his problems. At best he was going to be more than a full day AWOL from camp—but that was rapidly getting to be the least of his worries.

Coming back to stand between the house and the cave, he once more surveyed Tyrrell's workplace. The more Jake stared at the entrance to the grotto-cave, and the futuristic electric lights within, the more intrigued he was with what he saw, though almost against his will.

Returning to the house, he found the shotgun still standing in its corner in the main room. Jake picked up the weapon and broke the action open. The chambers were loaded, all right, with what looked like regular shells.

Camilla, her face looking swollen from weeping but eager to please, had come to stand close beside him, watching.

Jake made his voice gentle when he spoke to her. "Camilla? If Edgar thinks he's keeping me a prisoner, how come he's so accommodating as to leave this for me?"

She went back into the kitchen, where, as Jake now noticed, she had started the process of baking bread. " 'Cause it won't do you any good."

"What if I pointed it at him? Told him he was gonna do what I want, from now on?"

"You could point it all you want. You could even shoot it at him, and it wouldn't help. I've seen that done." Camilla, pausing with bread-dough on her fingers, nodded.

"Somebody took a shot at Edgar? With this?"

Another nod.

"Who?"

"Somebody who was here before you were."

Then he wasn't the first one she'd enticed in here. Well, that hardly mattered now. There were moments when Jake thought all three of them must be crazy—Camilla, the hard-to-find old man, and not least himself.

"Shot at him but didn't hit him?"

"Hit him all right. Shot went right through him, tore the clothes he had on all to pieces. Didn't hurt him any, though." Jake got the impression that in relating this lunacy Camilla was describing something she'd seen herself, or was convinced that she had seen.

Jake decided to let the question of this impossible shooting drop, for the time being anyway. And he let the loaded shotgun stay where it was—for the time being.

"You're baking bread. That must mean you're staying for a while."

Camilla didn't say anything to that. The movements of her working hands were brisk and forceful.

"Why'd you come here in the first place?"

"Didn't have anywhere else to go. Met Edgar in a tavern in Flagstaff, and he was nice-looking—he looked years younger then—and a real smooth talker. He told me how his wife had left him, just walked out. Didn't ask me to marry him. Asked me if I'd come and model for him. I said all right, though I figured he'd expect more than modeling. I was right." Abruptly Camilla stopped talking.

"How come his wife could walk out, but we can't?"

"How do I know? After she was gone, he must have fixed it somehow so no one else could go."

"He sounds like a magician."

"Don't laugh. You haven't seen much of him yet."

"I'm tryin', I'm tryin'. So once you came here and took your clothes off, he wanted something else besides just looking at you."

"At first he did." Camilla shrugged. "For the past year all he's done is use me as a model."

"You've really been here more than a year?"

She glared at Jake, for once seeming to be angry with him. "What've I been telling you? How'm I supposed to get away?"

In response to further questions, Camilla admitted that she still did sessions of modeling for old Edgar, though not as often. "Been almost a month now."

Once she'd put her bread dough aside to rise, Jake got her to walk with him back to the cave. This time he found the switch for the futuristic lights and turned them on himself.

And this time he noticed that there was one more room in the cave, an unlighted chamber far in the back. It was accessible, if you could call it that, only by a crevice as narrow as the one leading to the place across the canyon where Tyrrell supposedly slept.

"What's back here?"

"That's where Edgar does a lot of work. I don't know what he works on, but he spends a lot of time back there."

"Got a flashlight?"

"I think there's one on the workbench." Camilla sounded reluctant.

Jake found the flashlight and used it, trying to peer into the recess. He caught one glimpse of something that made him jump, a moving object that he didn't know what to make of and didn't like. The impression Jake received was of a figure, a ghostly-looking thing as big as a man, a featureless, faceless glowing form that stood for an instant in the light and then moved away, into a part of the half-hidden chamber that he couldn't see. Or had it been not a figure at all, but only an odd reflection of his own light on the strange rocks?

Jake gritted his teeth and tried to find the thing again. No dice. It must have been only a strange reflection of the flashlight's beam, he thought. There was nothing else to be seen now in the blockaded chamber, just another area of the cave, empty except for some marks of cutting with hand tools on the walls and floor. It looked like someone had been working hard in that back room. Maybe there was another way in and out of it, some passage that Jake couldn't see from where he was.

When Jake and Camilla were back inside the cottage, he confronted her again. "So, up until six months ago you slept with him. And now he doesn't care about that kind of thing?"

"Even at the start, when I first came here, I only—went to bed with him a few times. In a way. But what he really brought me here for was to model."

"What do you mean, you went to bed with him in a way? He didn't like to do it the normal way?"

"Nope."

"How, then?"

"Does it matter?" Camilla wasn't eager to talk about that part of her story. "You don't need to be jealous of Edgar, lover. What you've got to be is careful of him."

"You think old Edgar is jealous of me? He's keeping me here so's he can have someone to be jealous of?"

"No. Not that way. But you better believe he's dangerous."

"Well, I'm not that worried. I won't need a shotgun, either, if he tries to give me a hard time."

"What'll you do, hit him with your fist?" Camilla looked scornfully at Jake. "That won't do you any more good than the shotgun. But I's'pose you've got to find out some things for yourself."

Jake could only gaze at her in hopeless puzzlement. "Where's he really sleep?" he demanded at last. "I have to talk to him."

"I showed you where he sleeps."

"Bullshit."

Camilla only sounded worried. "Honey? Edgar's a very unusual man."

He nodded grimly. "That's what you keep telling me. I'm ready to take your word for that."

"He's a very nasty man too. I wish to God I—you and I—could get away."

"Well, honey, we will, just as soon as I get some things figured out. You keep telling me Edgar's the one who's somehow keeping us here. How can that be?"

"He has some way of controlling time. Making doorways in it. Opening and closing them."

"Huh?"

"Jake, I told you, time isn't just time down here. Everywhere else hours and days just go by normally. Not here, not in the Deep Canyon. Down here it's what I call deep time. Edgar's tried to explain to me how it works, some of it anyway, but I don't get it. Maybe you can get him to explain it to you."

"Maybe I can. I bet I can."

Jake spoke those words softly, but his tone must have alarmed Camilla. She said: "Don't think because he looks old you can just twist his arm or beat him up. He's stronger'n any man I ever met."

"Yeah?"

"Take my word for it, honey." She paused, looking at Jake. "You're not gonna just take my word, are you?"

Jake made a large, solid fist, and looked at it. There was no fat on him, and every muscle in his body was hard, from four months of building trails. "Doesn't seem like I'm gettin' anywhere without fighting him. And you tell me that whatever's happened, it's up to Edgar to straighten it out if he wants to."

"Don't just jump in and fight with him, honey." Camilla leaned very close to Jake. "Honey? You hear me? And that shotgun, leave it alone. I tell you, that doesn't mean anything to Edgar. Just make him mad, if he thinks you're ready to kill him."

"What do you mean, a shotgun doesn't mean anything?"

She leaned back and spoke confidently. "All right then, go ahead, try using it on Edgar and see. Don't blame me if it makes him mad."

Jake didn't say anything. He could imagine himself using a shotgun on someone, but only as a last resort, if his life depended on it.

Camilla moved toward him smiling, and they kissed. But even this woman's lips, even her body, could now distract Jake only briefly.

"You haven't seen anyone besides Edgar in all that time?"

She hesitated. "I've seen a couple of people."

"Who?"

No answer.

"Like the person who shot at him with the shotgun."

A nod.

"A man."

"Yes."

"You mean these other people were here and then got out? Where'd they go?"

"Nobody got out." Then Camilla added: "The man who shot at him is dead."

Try as he might, Jake couldn't get any more details out of her about the supposed shooting.

"All right, all right. So, Edgar sleeps in there, does he? That means at sunset he's gonna come out of that cave where you say he sleeps? Come out through that little crack?"

Camilla nodded.

At sunset Jake was across the creek, over on the other side of the amphitheater, watching the little cave from no more than twenty feet away. It happened after the sun was completely down. One moment there was no one else in sight, and the next, Jake couldn't see how it was done, Tyrrell was standing there in front of him.

"Camilla's been talking about me, I see," said the old man, looking at Jake with no particular surprise or anger.

Jake was too stupefied to answer right away.

The old man nodded slowly. "All right, maybe it's just as well. Let her talk. Now maybe you'll believe her. I hope you're ready to learn your job?"

Jake ignored that. "I want out of here."

"I have no interest in what you want. I asked you a question about your work."

"To hell with your work. I'm telling you what—"

The open-handed slap came at the side of Jake's head so fast that he had no chance to block it or dodge it. It hit him so hard that both of his ears rang, and he staggered away, almost falling.

In a moment he had got his legs under him again and was coming back. He launched a hard swing with his right fist, aiming for the old man's jaw.

—and in the next instant Jake's arm was caught. Camilla was yelling, screaming something in the background. Jake tried to jerk free, but there was no chance. His right arm felt like some heavyweight wrestler had his wrist in both hands, twisting, but he could see plainly enough that it was only little old Tyrrell, gripping him casually with one.

"I'm not really going to hurt you," the old man told Jake patiently, when Jake had given up struggling. "Because I want you to work, and I still have hopes that you'll be bright enough to learn what you need to learn, with only a little pain."

One-handed, Tyrrell twisted the arm a little farther, not very far, and Jake cried out helplessly and went down on his knees.

"Enough?"

"Enough!"

"Are you working for me? Taking orders?"

"I'll take orders!"

Tyrrell let him go. Then the old man turned half away and started walking, then paused, turned, and motioned for Jake to follow him. "Come along, I'll show you what I expect you to do. By this time tomorrow you'd better have something accomplished."

Jake struggled back to his feet, nursing a wrenched but not disabled arm. The old man's strength just wasn't human.

Tyrrell was waiting to see what Jake was going to do next. Jake wasn't going to do anything.

Tyrrell said: "If you want to live here, you're going to have to work. You've had a day to get used to the idea. Now come along."

Jake was aware of Camilla, watching fearfully from a little distance. But he didn't even look at her. He followed the old man.