Dominion

EIGHT

As soon as Simon had left her alone in the secret passage, a little after three o’clock, Margie put her shoulder bag down on the dusty floor, with the silent hope that nothing was going to crawl into it. Actually the risk didn’t seem great. The passage was basically free of vermin, as far as she had been able to see, except for those few spider webs near the entrance. It wasn’t really dirty except for the inevitable layer of floor dust. This dust was thin in most places, and had been untrodden everywhere until she and Simon had left their tracks in it.

A faint, unidentifiable sound was coming from somewhere now, doubtless from deep in the house. Margie reacted by looking through a spyhole again, into the nearest bedroom. The room was well furnished in a sort of pseudo-antique style, and there was no sign that anyone was currently using it. She guessed that a door in one wall, standing ajar, led to a private bath. It would be great to be able to nip in through the secret panel and use the can, but there was no evidence that the bedroom was going to remain unoccupied for the next two minutes. Things weren’t desperate yet.

Margie sighed, and removed her eye from the peephole, and looked up and down the dark passage as well as she could without using the flash. She wished for a chair. Somehow she felt reluctant to sit, even in her utilitarian jeans, on the old dust of this floor. She supposed that in a few hours she’d change her mind and stop being so finicky.

She wished she knew how she was going to spend the next four or five hours or more, until performance time. She wished there were a ladies’ room available.

Well, she might be able to do something about that difficulty, if she were to scout around a little. When people designed elaborate secret passages, it seemed possible that they might design some kind of secret comfort facilities in. If not she could always come back here and risk the secret panel. Margie really didn’t want to do that, though. She could imagine herself pushing the panel open, while unseeable against its inner surface there stood a little table holding a priceless something-or-other. Probably a vase. Crash, and then an interesting social situation. No, she would explore some other possibilities first.

In a moment Margie had shouldered her bag again, and was creeping as silently as possible back along the passage in the direction from which she and Simon had ascended. Simon had said there were panels opening into two of these bedrooms, and the others were open to hidden observation. She wondered if she and Si were going to be put up in any of these rooms. Yep, the old guy who had imported and rebuilt this place had been a little kinky, all right. At best, he’d nourished a fondness for a kind of humor Margie didn’t appreciate. She wondered how the heirs, when they learned about the secret passage, would take the revelation of the sort of guy Grandpa had been. Or, could she and Simon do the act so well that the existence of the passage still wouldn’t be suspected? That would be a real achievement. Possibly they could. They were good, as good as anyone, Margie thought, when things were going right.

Again there drifted muffled sound from somewhere. These were faint, but Margie got the impression that there was something spasmodic and desperate about them. Probably someone just horsing around. Or wrestling with some heavy furniture. Of course it could be people really fighting, dead serious about it. Even as Margie paused to listen, the noise ceased. She waited a little, but could hear nothing more, and moved along again. She wanted to get down to the lower passage, which she recalled was a little wider and ought to offer a more comfortable place to wait in.

It still didn’t really make sense, she thought, that Si knew about all these secret ways and peepholes, and the people who lived here didn’t. She wondered why he had seemed so shaken today, at a couple of places while they were climbing the hill through the woods. He’d said that someday he’d tell Margie the whole story, about his growing up in these parts; which meant, if Margie understood Simon as well as she thought she was beginning to understand him, that he would never tell her any more. Simon wasn’t a bad guy, and Margie liked working with him. He was all professionalism, as a rule, when it came to the act. As for the love life, well, he wouldn’t be her first choice for that. There was always the feeling that he was really thinking about something or someone else.

Margie was passing another peephole, and without much of a struggle she yielded to the temptation to pause and take a look. Another bedroom, with a suitcase on the floor. The spyhole gave a perfect view of the bed, which had two people sitting on it. A grossly heavy, swarthy man, just sitting there, turned so Margie couldn’t see his face, half dressed. Another half-dressed figure, facing the other way, a body so thin that Margie wasn’t sure for a moment that it was female, staring into space. Almost immediately Margie turned away. Ugh. There had been a wrongness in that room. She felt as if she had just spied on people laboriously inventing some new perversion. They looked as if they might have just finished such a task.

Now, if and when the secret passageway became general knowledge during the weekend, that couple, all the guests, would wonder who might have watched them doing what. Ugh. Complications.

Margie moved on, for the sake of silence scraping the walls as little as possible. She traversed what was left of the upper passage and then went down the long, steep stairs, using her light. When at last she reached the peephole giving a view of the great hall, nothing had changed. The great logs still crackled in the enormous fireplace, the pig or whatever it was continued roasting. The aroma made Margie hungry. In her shoulder bag were a couple of candy bars that she meant to eat later. Anyway she certainly wasn’t just going to camp in this spot waiting for Simon to appear. He’d need an hour, at the very least, to get back across the river and then drive round, by way of the bridge at Blackhawk, to approach the castle by road in the manner of an ordinary guest.

Using her flashlight sparingly, keeping its beam aimed low, Margie went on down, following the tunnel underground. A minute more, and she had passed the branching way—without giving it much thought—and was back in the cave, peering out into the now-gloomy daylight of the deserted grotto and its paved forecourt with the statues and the curious stone table. The fact that a cloud had come over the sun made the whole place now look somehow ominous. But, reassuringly, it was as quiet and uninhabited as ever. The jail-door was closed and bound with the chain and lock—Simon on going out must have been careful to leave it exactly as before, which was only what you would expect from someone as meticulously professional about details as he was. Now Margie ought to be able to do the same thing with the gate, and just slip out for a minute into these deserted woods…

It took a little more than a minute, maybe two or three. Then she was back inside the cave again, physically relieved and ready to concentrate properly on the job at hand. She carefully bound up the chain and lock just as before, and retreated into the underground portion of the passage. The next step, she had decided, would be to get a little rest. She would find a relatively dustfree place and stretch out, maybe catch a little nap. Margie knew her own habits; the danger that she was going to oversleep was just about zero.

Within a few minutes Margie was dozing on the tunnel floor, shoulder bag serving as a pillow. When she awoke it was with a start, and the feeling of having been asleep for some time. At first she had no faintest idea of where she was or how she’d got here.

Memory returned, bringing with it reassurance of a sort. The gloom in the tunnel was much thicker than it had been when Margie dozed off; darkness had obviously fallen outside. She had a bad moment, wondering if after all she could have overslept. But no, her watch showed it to be only a little before seven. Some shadow must have come over the inlets for air and light. Perfect timing, she thought, or close to perfect. They had decided dinner probably wouldn’t start till eight, and the show would go on after dinner.

Margie rose without haste and stretched. Then she picked up her bag and hurried along to the agreed-upon primary rendezvous, the peephole giving into the great hall. She braced herself in a standing position at the lookout, watching and waiting for Simon to appear.

Her wait was short, so short that she again sent up a silent cheer for perfect timing. Here came Simon from another room, alone, wearing his swim trunks now and carrying still-dry towel. The expression on his face told Margie of controlled worry, concern deeper than the usual preperformance tenseness. Maybe, she thought guiltily, Si had been here at the rendezvous before, trying to signal her about some problem.

He gave the primary signal now, brushing at his hair, and Margie felt another twinge of guilt to see his relief when she answered at once with the flashlight, signaling that she was in place and everything was fine. And then Margie could feel relieved, for Si signaled to her nothing about difficulty or cancellation; he only paused for a moment, looking up at something above Margie’s head and out of her range of vision, and then he walked on out of the great hall, doubtless to have his swim. She thought it must be something other than the performance itself that was worrying him. Maybe he’d been told that the fee wasn’t going to be a full thousand after all.

Anyway she could now relax again for a little while. Things were rolling, the act could go smoothly, just the way they wanted it. They might even pull off a really spectacular effect. Margie could imagine how it would be for the audience, a roomful of people absolutely certain that they were facing solid stone walls, when a voice spoke to them out of nowhere, and then in response to a magician’s gesture the figure of a young woman took shape out of thin air…

It wasn’t too early now for her to get her costume on. She slipped it out of the handbag and inspected it as well as she could in the poor light. Diaphanous was the word. She had debated with herself about how much to wear underneath it, and was glad now that she’d decided a full leotard wasn’t too much. She had the leotard on now under her shirt and jeans, and a good thing too, if that fat man she’d just been spying on upstairs was going to be in the audience, as he undoubtedly was. Something about him made Margie shudder inwardly, and she hadn’t even seen his face.

She exchanged her white gym shoes for black ballet slippers for the performance; not that it was unlikely that anyone would be studying her feet very closely.

She had just finished changing, except for her shoes, and had got the street clothing crammed into the handbag, when new distraction came, in the form of what sounded like a groan. It was a faint sound, yet gave the impression of coming from somewhere uncomfortably close. There couldn’t, thought Margie, there absolutely couldn’t be anyone else in this unknown passage with her. And yet it certainly sounded like it.

Another faint groan wavered in the air, again too close for comfort, too close to be ignored. Was Margie herself now to be the target for some kind of trick?

That was one of the first thoughts that leapt into her mind. She had to know. Penlight in hand, Margie prowled the tunnel. Not that way, this way. The moaning sound obligingly repeated at irregular short intervals. She was led to the branch passage going down, but paused at its top step. She had assumed, when Simon ignored the branch, that he knew where it led and that it could be disregarded.

Now that she looked carefully, she could see one set of footprints in the dust of the stairs before her. It was hard to tell if the faint prints were going up or down.

She sat her shoulder bag down carefully on the floor, leaving herself freer for quick action, and tiptoed down the stairs, stepping in the tracks. She came to a thick wooden door, standing slightly open. The groans emanating from its other side. When she snapped off her tiny flashlight she could see faint torchlight flickering through the opening around the door.

Margie stood still, thinking. She didn’t need to think for very long. Groans and an open door, whatever else they might mean, indicated that other people besides herself and Simon had to be aware of the supposedly secret passage. They meant, at the very least, that the whole elaborately planned trick had to be considered blown. They meant—

She had to find out what they meant. It was impossible to do anything else until she knew.

The door swung back easily, with only the faintest squeaking of its antique-looking hinges. What lay beyond it resolved no questions for Margie, but only raised them to a new level.

In her short life she had seen a lot of acts, good ones and bad ones, from inside and out. She could tell at first glance that the semiconscious old man bound to the torture rack was no willing participant of any act. His arms and legs were almost plump, his ribs scrawny. His head, shaggy with gray hair and beard, rolled slowly from side to side. His eyes were closed. His mouth, open to reveal bad teeth, drooled a little from one corner.

Margie approached. She prodded the old man gently with a finger in the ribs. The only response was another groan. Then she reached to loosen the leather strap binding the old man’s left wrist; it looked so tight that she was sure it must be hurting him. The buckle, of an odd design, and very stiff, resisted her first efforts. Margie’s fingernails were of a practical short length, but she was afraid for a moment that she’d broken one, maybe because all of a sudden her hands had started to shake. The strap came loose at last. The old man’s pinched wrist was relieved, but his arm stayed where it was; he wasn’t going to wake up.

“That’s it, then,” said Margie to herself, aloud and decisively. At that moment she completely abandoned all thoughts of being able to go on with the performance as planned. This old man was real, and really hurting. She had to reveal her presence and get help.

As Margie turned away from the rack, the idea had just begun to form in her mind that Simon might be in some kind of serious trouble too, and for that matter herself as well. If the people in charge of this castle were people who did things like this—

The thought had no time to develop. A muscular young black man wearing a dark shirt was standing in a second doorway to the room, looking at Margie. It was a recessed doorway that she had not noticed until this moment. The man’s skin was the color of creamed coffee, and his face was handsome in a way that struck Margie at first glance as somehow, indefinably, flawed. And he was looking every bit as surprised as Margie felt. It wasn’t the old man tied on the rack that had surprised him, though. It was Margie.

“How in hell many of you are there?” he murmured in a soft voice. The question seemed not to need an answer; in the next moment he took a step toward her.

Margie, who had just begun a protest speech, cut it off and instinctively stepped back. Whatever it was about the man facing her, posture, movement, look, she was warned. On nimble feet she got the only large obstacle in the room, the rack with its still-groaning occupant, between herself and the advancing man.

With the rack between them, she gazed at the black man, and he at her. The dim light in the room flickered, the torch guttering on the wall.

“I’m asking you, who else is in here, woman?” The man had paused in his advance. He swung a quick look around him now, at the door to the once-secret tunnel standing wide open, then at once back to Margie.

Margie couldn’t answer. She wouldn’t have been able to speak, even if she’d had words ready; there seemed to be something wrong with her throat. She was pretty well boxed-in behind the rack, with little room to maneuver. The stone wall touched her back.

“Come here.” The man moved toward her slowly. His eyes were unblinking, and in them grew a frightening happiness. Then he smiled lightly, as if at the foolishness of simply telling her to come to him.

His strong-looking arms were half extended, fingers curved for a quick grab.

“No.”

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah, lady. Here to me.”

If the man lunged straight across the rack he would be able to grab her. And now he did lunge, with unexpected, cobraish speed. He had Margie by the wrist, trying to pull her toward him.

Margie had wiry strength, and desperation. They struggled together for a moment like obscene actors, across the old man’s naked torso. Then something happened, Margie couldn’t tell what, but the crushing grip on her arm was suddenly broken. Her assailant made a strange sound, slumping back, sliding down to one knee.

Gasping as if she had been knifed, Margie scraped herself out from behind the constricting rack and ran for the tunnel door. Wherever the other door might lead, her attacker had come from there, it was his turf, there might be more of him that way. Her one thought was to reach the open air and daylight. Once out in the tunnel she climbed the stairs in a mad all-fours scramble that brought her back to the main passage. Then she turned to her right and ran, gambling that she could run in this thick gloom without disaster, rather than delay the fraction of a second needed to get the flashlight from her costume’s pocket.

Daylight had all but disappeared when Margie reached the cave mouth. In her terror she saw this fact as another phase of an attack aimed at her. Sobbing, she threw herself down at the base of the barred gate that held her in the cave, fumbling in a mad panic to loosen again the padlock and the chain. With every second stretched in terror she heard imagined footfalls of pursuit. And yet no horror arrived to seize her from behind. Somehow the lock did open in her fingers; the chain rattled through them, tearing at her skin.

Margie burst the freed door clanging open and ran out. A few heavy, preliminary drops of rain were striking on the paved court, on the stone table with its obscure sundial. A statue gaped in her path, glaring at her with dead gray eyes; she ran around it. The heat of the day had dissipated now in the damp hush before the storm; the shadow of the castle lay enormous on the woods around her now. She scraped her shin, uncaring, on the low stone fence that rimmed the courtyard from the woods. Tree branches hanging motionless in gloom scraped at her as she fled. The path was not really visible now, but here there was only one level route a path could take. Margie sped along it gasping, the branches that clawed at her threatening to turn into apparitions.

Even with the forest altered by dusk the intersection of paths was unmistakable. She turned downhill, running without pause. In what seemed nightmare slowness the switchback curves of the descending path flowed past her. It was now so dark that she was sure the sun was down. A single raindrop struck her cheek. Through gaps in the trees, by the light of an odd sky, she saw clouds coursing thick and low, like airborne giants hunting across the valley of the Sauk.

The ugly realization overtook Margie as she ran: there would be no boat waiting at the landing below. Simon would already have taken it back across the river.

Then she would plunge into the water, swim, wade, do whatever she had to do to get away. At least, thank God, no one was chasing her.

And then she heard, from up the hill behind her, that someone was. Or something. Not even human feet. In a moment the sound identified itself to her fear as a pounding, four-legged run, as of some monstrous dog.

Terror compounded, escalating into something approaching madness. Just as Margie rounded the last steep descending turn of path, exhausted muscles failed and her foot slipped, the ankle starting to twist. She came down heavily, in rough grass and weeds. With superhuman speed her pursuer was catching up. The sound of onrushing feet was mixed now with a hideous growling and snuffling, the noises of a menacing dog amplified to the proportions of a bear.

Margie screamed, her mind gone in blind panic. Just as she lunged to regain her feet, a shaggy, stinking shape loomed over her. What felt like a furred muzzle struck her on the cheek, hard enough to knock her down again. She had a moment’s glimpse of literally glowing eyes, and monstrous fangs.

Margie screamed again, a hopeless quavering. The pressure of a paw at her throat kept her down on her back. At last with pure relief she heard the running arrival of a pair of human feet, she cared not whose.

The black man’s soft voice, panting, was hot with anger now. “You got her. Good.” It sounded as if he were speaking to another person, not a beast. Then his tone shifted, purring at Margie: “One more yell, and he’ll take a chunk out of you where you won’t like it. Believe me?”

“Yes,” said Margie. And the animal, as if her answer had satisfied it, at once removed its pinning weight.

“Get up,” the man said.

Margie got up, very slowly, surprised to find herself practically unhurt. What had been a gauzy costume was little more than trailing rags. She and the man were both still gasping from the downhill run. Meanwhile the impossible beast—Margie couldn’t convince herself it was only a dog—sat on its haunches staring at her. Its black fur was long and so was its lolling pink tongue. There was something thickly, horribly human about that tongue. In its sitting position the beast was almost tall enough to look Margie in the eye.

“Now don’t run,” the man advised her, getting his breathing under control. “Don’t do anything now but what I say. Just walk back up the path. That way you stay alive.”

Surely, thought Margie, before she had climbed as far as the castle again, she could somehow manage to wake up. No nightmare went on indefinitely. And at the same time she knew better. Across the river, its sound carrying freely over the broad water, a diesel semi was taking the narrow highway at high speed. Its headlights might as well have been shining somewhere on Mars.

“Get moving.”

Slowly, wordlessly, Margie turned and started up the path. At least her ankle wasn’t really twisted. But she kept to a slow limp.

The man, climbing only a pace behind her, spoke in a low voice almost in her ear. “Tell me, how many of you were in that tunnel altogether? Who else is there?” And another few steps behind them both, the beast paced slowly. From its throat now came a straining growl, as if only with the greatest effort could it keep itself from seizing Margie in its jaws.

Margie would have been quite willing to answer the man’s question, if she could have understood it. To ask how many were in the tunnel seemed to mean—

This time the four-footed run approaching down the path was almost silent; for all its size the pale bulk that hurtled leaping in the night was almost on top of Margie, before she was aware of it. She made a small sound and tried to throw herself aside. A furred shape as heavy as that of the first beast brushed her in its passage, knocking her aside. This time Margie fell softly. On the slope below there sounded impact, as if a rolling boulder had collided with a tree. Margie slid into tangling bushes on the steep slope. Nearby was thrashing confusion, savage noise as of great beasts in combat. When Margie freed herself from the bushes she slipped and again rolled over on the slope. Her mind spun dizzily.

Half stunned, she raised her head. The black man was nowhere to be seen. The beast that had threatened her, the dark-furred one, was down on the ground while the pale newcomer crouched over it, attacking, driving for the throat. The position held for only a moment. Then the dark beast with a great yowl of agony fought to its feet. Another cry, and it had torn free of its attacker and burst into flight. It hurtled past Margie, ignoring her, its eyes glaring redly. Its next howl, receding, seemed to reach her ears from a long distance away.

The merciless clarity of a lightning flash showed Margie the second beast turning her way. Its own glowing eyes were now fixed on her, and dark stains were already matting dry on its pale fur.

Margie rolled away. With horrible ineffective slowness she got herself up on all fours. She knew even as she moved that before she could even begin to run again the great pale beast was going to land on her back…

Lightning flashed again.

“Wait,” said a man’s voice, close behind Margie, just as she crouched to run. It was a deep, compelling voice, one that she had not heard before.

Poised for hopeless flight, she turned her head. The pale-furred animal had vanished. Where it had been, a tall, lean man now stood, dressed in black trousers and a black turtleneck shirt. His eyes did not glow, but they were fixed on Margie just as the eyes of the pale wolf had been. The man appeared to be bleeding heavily from his left shoulder, up near his throat, but still he stood erect.

Margie whimpered.

“Softly,” the deep voice commanded. “Calm yourself; for the moment you are safe. Tell me who you are. My name is Talisman.”