Dominion

FIVE

It was about three on a hot Friday afternoon when Simon Hill and Margie Hilbert arrived in Frenchman’s Bend in Simon’s five-year-old car. For Simon, the drive out from Chicago had also been a trip back into memory, back into time. It had been enjoyable in spots, but mainly—he wasn’t sure why—it had been disturbing.

“Frenchman’s Bend,” he said now, slowing in anticipation on the two-lane concrete highway, almost roofed by the arches of overhanging trees. “I bet they still don’t even have a population figure on the sign.”

Margie in the right front seat was looking past Simon and across the broad expanse of the Sauk, which was high for summer. She had been quietly admiring the scenery since they had crossed the river at Blackhawk, now almost twenty miles upstream behind them. “Si, you say you know these people who own this place we’re going to?”

“Yeah. Sort of. Actually we’re distant cousins. We’ve been out of touch.”

“Not only that, you don’t like them, do you?”

He grunted.

“I get the impression that you’re even out to get back at them for something.”

Simon didn’t answer.

“It’s just that if I’m going to wind up in the middle of something, I’d like to know what’s going on. We’re supposed to spend a whole weekend there.”

“I guess I wouldn’t count on doing that.” He kept expecting to see the recognizably final bend in the highway, and it kept being just a little farther on than he had thought. Now he glanced at Margie, who was still waiting for a real answer, and had to admit that she had a point. The trouble was, he didn’t know what answer would be the truth. “Well,” he said, “it’s a long story. Would you believe, I won’t know how I feel about these people until I see them again? Right now the feelings are not too good. But…”

“You were just a kid when you saw them last, huh? What kind of a fight did you have? Was it one of these family things about money?”

“No. My branch of the family was never in line for any of that anyway.” He drove for a little while in silence. “I was fifteen years old. Saul was maybe twelve. Vivian was about a year older than me, I guess. I had my first affair with her. She’s the Miss Littlewood that old Gregory mentioned. Actually…”

“Yeah?”

“Actually I’m not sure what role old Gregory played. I have some confused memories about him.” He glanced at Margie; she wasn’t understanding this; well, that was the point, he had never been able to sort it out himself.

Margie, practical as usual, was thinking ahead to other matters. “You think the old guy was just conning us about there being entertainment people in the group for the weekend?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

The last bend before Frenchman’s was here at last. The highway curved sharply, under graceful arches of tree limbs. On the right a hill rose up, too steep for farming or even grazing, heavily wooded; on the left, a gently sloping bank only a few yards wide fell to the broad surface of the Sauk. This part of the highway was threatened with flooding fairly often in the spring. Just ahead, the bank going down to the river widened somewhat, and a few old buildings came into view, still half concealed by the summer growth that lined both sides of the highway.

“This is it,” said Simon. “I was wrong about the population sign. They don’t even have one any more.” There was, at the moment, no other traffic in sight to worry about. He pulled left across the single oncoming lane and onto a clay-and-gravel shoulder that blended into a broad stub of road or driveway serving the three or four buildings that made up this side of the hamlet. A couple of other cars, unfamiliar to Simon, were parked here; no people were in sight. He braked to a gentle halt in the shade of a huge old elm, familiar once he saw it again, but till this moment forgotten. The elm was the biggest healthy specimen he could remember seeing anywhere, having somehow survived the Dutch disease that had all but exterminated its species in these parts a few decades back.

Like all the towns along this part of the river, Frenchman’s Bend straddled the highway. Four buildings, including sheds, on the side toward the river, maybe twice that many on the other. In his first look around at the place, Simon could not see that anything at all had changed in fifteen years.

He got out of the car, listening to cicadas drone, looking around some more. The stub of road that he had parked on continued to the edge of the low bluff on which the houses stood, then plunged down through a broad cut in the bluff to the shoreline just a few feet below. The bluffs along this side of the river were considerably lower than those lining the opposite bank, several hundred yards away. Over there the land rose abruptly from the shoreline well over a hundred feet, a height exaggerated by the tallness of the trees atop the bluffs; all that could be seen of the far shore was a continuous soft leafy mass.

In Frenchman’s Bend the old frame houses stood as Simon remembered them. Whether it was the same paint covering them now or not, it looked no older than the paint of fifteen years ago. The two parked cars were unfamiliar, though; even here some things had to change.

With Margie following him silently, Simon turned his back on the houses for a moment and walked to the place where the road cut through the bluff. He stood there looking down. On the gravel shingle just below was an abandoned pile of clamshells, left over from the decades before plastic buttons, when the freshwater shells had had some commercial value. Simon remembered the shell pile as soon as he saw it again, as with the giant elm.

No one around here built a permanent boat-dock; the spring ice-jams and floods tended to be too fierce, tearing away anything weaker than a bridge abutment. But there was an old rowboat, too lacking in distinction for Simon’s memory to feel sure about it, tied by padlocked chain to the trunk of a stubby, familiar willow. And, on the narrow strip of sand that at the water’s very edge blended into rich mud, an aluminum canoe, unlocked, had been inverted, with a wooden paddle partially visible underneath it. If this was the same canoe that he remembered—

Motion and whiteness, along the wooded shore of an island a hundred yards out in the stream, caught Simon’s eye. He looked up sharply.

Margie, who had been gazing out across the water in a different direction, turned toward him. “What is it?”

“I thought I saw… someone out on the island.” The impression, momentary but convincing, had been of pale flesh, completely unclothed, and dark curly hair. Of course what was much more likely was that he had seen someone wearing some light-colored summer garment.

At the distance, he reflected as he watched the island, it would be hard for even the steadiest gaze to perceive curliness.

An insect droned from across the water. “Looks like a real jungle over there,” said Margie without much interest.

Was his imagination continuing to add details, or had he really seen the figure, in that one doubtful moment, as beckoning to him with one arm. He closed his eyes. An inner voice said that, even if he couldn’t remember it, there was good reason why he hadn’t come back here for fifteen years.

Simon opened his eyes again before Margie could take notice. Now on a sudden impulse he climbed a few steps, from the road to the lip of the bluff. From here he stared downstream, between islands, along the longest visible reach of the river. He knew where the castle stood, half a mile downstream, atop the high bluff opposite. Simon knew the exact direction in which to look, or thought he did, because he had seen it often enough from this very spot in winter, its gray stone angles standing out starkly amid a tracery of black branches, against gray winter sky…

A crow, cawing sharply as if disturbed by someone nearby, came up from amid the trees of the nearest island, the one where Simon thought that he had seen the figure. Well then, there was someone on the island, and what of it? But he felt relieved.

“I’ve never been in a canoe,” said Margie, looking down toward the shingle. “Is that how we’re going to get across?”

“We’ll see,” Simon told her. “Look, we’ll just check it out as far as we can go, the secret passage and the rest. When we hit a snag that could stop us we’ll give up the idea and come back here and drive back to Blackhawk and around and drive up to the castle by the front door like they’re expecting us to do, and put on our alternate act. But the secret passage just makes too beautiful an opportunity to resist, if it’s still there and we can use it. Right?”

Margie had been doubtful all along. “The people who own the place now don’t know this passageway is there?”

“I tell you I don’t think they do. And it can’t hurt anything to try.” Simon resolutely turned his back on the water.

There were two houses on this side of the highway, along with a couple of outbuildings. In front of the bigger house a wooden sign said BOATS. The ANTIQUES sign Simon also remembered had disappeared sometime in the last decade and a half; he thought he could make out from here the slightly discolored spot on a tree trunk where it had been nailed.

“Canoes are all right,” he said to Margie now. “You can tip them if you try, or if you jump around wildly in one, but you’re all right if you just sit still. I can do the paddling.” As he spoke he had started walking toward the larger house, with Margie keeping at his side. Now he could see that the name on the rural mailbox a few yards from the house still said Colline. And when he squinted through the heat-shimmer of the concrete to the far side of the highway, it seemed to Simon that he could still make out faded letters on one of the mailboxes over there: Wedderburn. That house on the far side stood next to a building that had once been a farm equipment store, though even in Simon’s earliest childhood memories it had been generations out of date and closed. If Gregory should appear in one of those doorways or windows now, would Simon, seen once more in a familiar context, be recognized?

But no one at all appeared. Simon led Margie on, toward the house-antique shop. Their feet made a sound that evoked memories for him, crunching lightly on an ancient detritus of broken clamshells, waste from the clam-fishing decades, pulverized by time and by now almost turned to soil.

A few steps from the closed front door of the house, he halted Margie for a moment. “My aunt and uncle used to run this place as an antique shop. For all I know they still do. I don’t know whether they’ll recognize me or not. If they don’t, I’d just as soon leave it at that.”

Margie frowned at him—she liked to think sometimes that she was softhearted on family relationships—then shrugged, pretty shoulders moving in the light, longsleeved shirt. “Whatever you say. It’s your town and your family, and you’re the boss on the job.”

Simon felt like kissing her, and knew she would resent it at this moment. Without giving himself time to think about it any more, he turned to the old familiar door and pulled it open. A moment later they were both stepping into the half-familiar semigloom of what had been—no, apparently still was—the antique shop’s main room. The place was crowded with dusty shapes that on a second glance turned out to be not junk for sale but only cases and mountings for displays. There was less actual merchandise on view than he remembered, but there was still some. Business appeared to be languishing even more now than it had been then, which he supposed was hardly surprising given the current absence of a sign out front.

The antique bell that he remembered had tinkled when they came in. Now Simon watched the curtained doorway that led to the living quarters in back. He was bracing himself for the sight of his aunt or uncle. The curtain stirred as he watched it, and in the fraction of a second before it was whipped aside he knew that if his relatives didn’t recognize him he wasn’t going to tell them who he was, either before or after the performance.

Except, of course, just possibly—Vivian. Had Miss Littlewood recognized Simon the Great when she saw him in performance, and had she sent Gregory with an invitation for that reason? Since the night in the chapel at TMU, Simon had tried a thousand times to picture what Vivian must be like now, at thirty. He had tried to analyze what he thought about her now, what his feelings were at the prospect of shortly seeing her again. The analysis had proved impossible. The thoughts and feelings would not fall into any ordinary category, except the inadequate one of curiosity.

And now the curtain was moved aside, and the world, as it often did, surprised Simon. The teenaged girl who emerged into the shop was a stranger to Simon’s memory, looking like no one in particular that he remembered from Frenchman’s Bend, looking as commonplace as any kid he’d seen on the way out from Chicago. The girl had dark hair, but there ended the resemblance to Vivian or to any half-glimpsed water nymphs. Here instead we had a moderately dumpy, banally adolescent figure in denim shorts and loosely swaddling halter top.

“Can I help you?” the girl asked, in a voice as reassuringly ordinary as the rest of her. She had put her hands on the counter near the kerosene lamp. Whether that particular lamp had been in stock fifteen years ago Simon had no way of telling. There was fluid in its glass reservoir, and the wick was charred. The house had electricity, of course, but that lamp had been used recently.

Simon smiled confidently. “I see you have a canoe down there. I’d like to rent it for a couple of hours.”

“No,” said the girl, shaking her head. It was a surprisingly quick, definite answer, as if such requests came frequently and she had been trained how to respond to them. But then she added unexpectedly: “If you want to go over to the castle, my brother can paddle you over.”

Simon blinked deliberately. “I didn’t say anything about a castle. You mean the huge house on the other side of the river?”

The girl surveyed them calmly. “You don’t look like you’re going fishing, or on a picnic.” Simon exchanged glances with Margie; they were both dressed casually, in practical jeans and longsleeved shirts against expected mosquitoes. Margie had on light white gym shoes, Simon brown suede loafers. But they weren’t dressed for fishing, and apart from Margie’s large shoulder bag they were carrying nothing.

Tuning up his smile to about its second most charming level, Simon told the girl: “We’re not waterskiing, either. All right, then, we’ll hire the canoe and your brother too for a couple of hours. Does he have a regular rate?”

“Talk to him,” the girl advised. “I’ll go get him.” She came out from behind the counter and scuffed on bare feet toward a side door.

In the dim light Simon looked around at tawdry, scanty merchandise, at junk, at dust. Margie’s eyes were alert and expectant but he had nothing to communicate to her at the moment. Listening carefully he could hear the girl’s quiet voice drifting in faintly from beyond the side door where she had gone out. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. There was a private yard out there, on the side of the house away from the highway, or at least there had been one when Simon lived here.

Shortly the girl came back into the shop, followed a moment later by a boy who in apparent age, about fifteen, might have been her twin, but who otherwise resembled her only vaguely. He was tightening the fancy belt buckle on his jeans; his lean chest showed under an unbuttoned gray shirt, and his feet were shoeless like his sister’s.

Simon asked him: “Five bucks an hour okay?”

“Yeah. Fine.” The youth sounded moderately eager.

“Our car’s not going to be in your way out here, is it?”

The girl assured them: “Nobody’ll bother it.”

Then Simon and Margie followed her untalkative brother out through the side door, past a couple of lawn chairs in the yard, and down a narrow path toward the water. The river, Simon thought to himself again, was quite high for midsummer; the lands to the north and east, along the upper Sauk and its tributaries in far northern Illinois and Wisconsin, must have been getting heavy rains lately. And he could see rainclouds now, in the southwest sky, beyond the wooded bluff where the hidden castle waited. When you lived in the city steadily, he thought, you lost touch with the weather, caring only how cold it was at the moment, whether you might be going to get wet. Anyway he estimated that the next rain here was still hours away; it shouldn’t interfere with what he and Margie were going to try to do.

Simon helped the boy turn over the canoe and get it into the water. Margie, following directions and making no fuss about possible tipping, got in without incident. Simon loaded his own considerably greater weight in near the middle of the craft; and then their barefoot guide shoved off and hopped in skillfully behind him.

Their guide’s presence restricted conversation somewhat. Simon had planned to use this portion of the trip for briefing Margie further on history and local conditions, but he would be able to do that later when they were alone. He sat in the canoe and looked around and thought.

So far, the view from the water only reinforced his general impression that nothing much had changed, except for people. He wondered without concern where his aunt and uncle were. Surely, if they had sold out or otherwise departed permanently, the name on the mailbox would have been changed by the new occupants. Of course the boy and girl might easily belong to some branch of the family. They would hardly have been born fifteen years ago, and Simon hadn’t kept up with any family events. He wondered idly if perhaps they were really twins; that would be consistent with their being relatives. It seemed that multiple births were more common in the complex of locally interrelated families than they were in the general population.

“It’s really pretty here,” said Margie, almost dreamily. She was sitting relaxed in the prow, as if she had in fact come here only for the scenery.

“Actually is,” Simon agreed. In his own mind the view upriver from Frenchman’s Bend was quite ordinary. In the far distance, a couple of miles above the town, the girders of the aging bridge had been repainted at some time and it was evidently still functional. Between the bridge and the town a scattering of tied-up boats and floating docks were visible along both shores. People from Blackhawk or elsewhere maintained riparian summer cottages along here, and farmers sometimes kept small craft tied up during ice-free weather, going fishing when they could. In the middle of a broad stretch half a mile upstream, an outboard towing a waterskier was droning in determined circles, like some huge insect magically confined.

Change in the scenery came swiftly as soon as the Sauk curved west and south from Frenchman’s Bend. Simon, looking back now, realized that he had always understood somehow that in the downstream direction ordinariness no longer applied. Looking ahead now as the canoe moved with the current, he saw what might almost be one of Mark Twain’s rivers. It would scarcely be a surprise to hear a steamboat hooting from a couple of bends downstream, feeling for the channel. In his childhood the old people of the neighborhood had talked about how in Twain’s day a few boats had actually ventured this far up from the Mississippi, seeking cargo.

Here, just below the bend, the Sauk ran for a time even broader than above. And here the width of the river appeared to be stretched by a flotilla of islands, all but the tiniest of them heavily wooded. Naturally being broader meant that the river here was shallower as well. With the exception of the elusive and sometimes shifting channel, vast stretches were no more than knee-deep even when the water, as now, was relatively high. This made power boating here below the Bend a very tricky proposition, and usually all the recreational boaters stayed above the town. Canoes, rowboats, and rafts, could certainly ply here, without any particular trouble, and yet with the exception of the few craft owned by Frenchman’s Bend people they rarely did. No other boats were to be seen now, anywhere ahead. Nor were there any cabins along the shore. Of course you wouldn’t want your cabin on a flood plain ten feet from the highway; and on the far shore the bluffs were too abrupt for cabins.

“It’s wild, too,” Simon said, belatedly continuing his response to Margie’s comment.

The boy, still silent behind Simon, just kept on paddling. He evidently knew the best routes among the islands as well as Simon had known them at his age. To reach the castle landing by the quickest way from the Frenchman’s Bend landing, you angled downstream between a certain large island and the small one next to it, which gave you the benefit of a slightly accelerated current; coming back upstream, if you hugged either shore you’d find yourself in slack water much of the way and not have to work against the current.

Already the great gentle bend of river behind the canoe had taken the railroad bridge and most of the distant cottages out of sight, as well as the buildings of Frenchman’s Bend itself. They were now passing between the two islands, both thickly overgrown. All of the islands here were small chunks of permanent wilderness, preserved from cottage-building by the high water that drowned them at least once a year, the spring ice jams that gouged bark from their trees and sometimes sprinkled them with kindling that had once been a boat dock or a shanty somewhere upstream. In summer the islands tended to be well populated with flies and mosquitoes, but they were visited sometimes by picnickers and fisherfolk nonetheless.

The island now passing on the right of the canoe was large, a couple of hundred yards long. It was the one where Simon earlier had thought he’d seen a figure moving. No reason, he repeated to himself now, why someone couldn’t be there. It was just that the figure he’d seen had seemed designed to evoke things in his memory.

No boats had been visible on either side of the island, which was the shape and he supposed about the size of a large ship, prow and stern carved narrow by the endless flow of water, maybe fifty yards across the beam amidships. In a couple of places along its shoreline, willows hung far out with their leaves trailing in the water, making under the curve of branches green dim caves in which a small boat might possibly lie tied up in concealment. Simon, gliding past, stared intently into the shadows under the willow branches, until he was sure that there could be no boat. A narrow shoreline rim of mudflat running virtually the whole length of the island was unmarked, as far as he could see, by any kind of recent human activity. At a faint splash of the canoe’s paddle the mud gave up a droning wasp, and then the blue-green drifting stiletto of a dragonfly. Simon could feel sweat trickling on his face. The middle of the island would be a green Brazilian wilderness today, with a thousand insects whining in the heat. Not a place where anyone would want to spend much time.

Now, for a minute or two, all the works of humanity save for the canoe and what was in it, had completely vanished.

Trickle of water from the paddle, and a drab hum of insects. And then there on the shoreline was some broken glass, and this was after all not the Amazon. A moment later the canoe had emerged from between islands, and now it was again possible to see a stretch of highway running close along what was now the farther bank. A car was passing a grumbling semitrailer, only a quarter of a mile away.

To Simon’s left, on the small island he had not been studying, something now moved slightly but suddenly in the bushes, and once more a crow flapped up with raucous noise. Simon turned his head sharply. Under the crow’s racket he’d heard a half-note of something that was almost music—from insect, bird, or human throat? It had reminded him of laughter… but now there was nothing to be seen by the near-jungle quiet in the heat.

The canoe was now aimed more directly toward the southeastern shore. Ahead Simon thought he could make out the place where the castle’s floating boat-dock had once been moored. He was not surprised to see that it was gone. All the better for his plans if there were no regular landings here. But the girl had asked him at once if they were going to the castle; that certainly suggested that others had recently come this route.

He turned his head to speak to the boy. “Do you carry many passengers this way?”

“Nope.” The youth didn’t seem to think anything of the question one way or another.

“Have you taken anyone before us?”

“Unh-unh.” Inflected to mean no.

“Your sister just seemed to assume this was where we were going. I wondered. By the way, are you twins?”

“Yep.”

As they drew near the landing place, now simply a narrow spot of sandy beach, Simon could detect no sign that other boats had recently come to shore. When the canoe grated on bottom, he edged past Margie, hopped ashore, than reached back to give her a hand. Then he turned to the boy, who was watching them uncertainly. “Just wait for us, okay? It could be as long as a couple of hours, but it could be just a few minutes. I’ll pay for your time. I’ll throw in a five dollar bonus. Will you wait?”

“Yeah,” said the boy. He got out of the canoe and with Simon’s help pulled it far enough out of the water to keep it from drifting. Then he pulled a paperback book out of the hip pocket of his jeans and sat down crosslegged on the sand, as if prepared for a lengthy wait.

Margie had her bag slung on one shoulder and looked ready for whatever came next. Simon smiled at her and led the way. In the narrow strip of riparian grass the path was less defined than he remembered it, in fact it was almost completely overgrown. All to the good. The new heirs were evidently no longer river people. They certainly must have more expensive toys now than canoes, and they could seek out more inviting waterways than this. They’d probably forgotten this part of their domain.

As there was almost no flat land at all along the shore, the path had no choice but to immediately angle up the bluff. The first tall trees closed in around it, and as soon as he entered shade the first mosquito whined in Simon’s ear. Good thing he’d remembered to have them both use repellent. He led the way on up, with Margie following in the narrow path.

Here what was left of the trail became somewhat more visible. Along most of its course the path was not as steep as the slope it climbed; it looped its way upward in sharp switchbacks with long legs of gentle ascent in between. At the second switchback Simon paused briefly to look down. Through a fragmentary screen of branches he could see that their guide had changed his position slightly, to sit now with his feet in the cooling water, his dark head bowed over the white pages of the book.

“He’s going to talk to people, isn’t he?” murmured Margie, who had come to a halt at Simon’s side. “About ferrying us over here.”

“I suppose he will. But not until the show’s over, I hope. I can promise him another five, and five for his sister, if they’ll keep quiet about it until tomorrow at least.”

“Last of the big spenders,” Margie murmured.

Simon winked at her, and, turning, climbed on. The path now ran through the full thickness of the woods. The tall tree trunks were not quite vertical, compromising with gravity and the steep angle of the land. After twenty yards or so, at the next switchback, Simon paused again, this time looking up. He took Margie by the arm and pointed. Now, indistinctly through a haze of summer growth, they had their first partial glimpse of the castle itself. Its gray stone walls, magnified ominously by their position, towered almost directly above them.

“It’s huge!”

“Well, yeah. Actually small for a castle, I suppose. It was a real castle once, in France. Somewhere in Brittany. Part of it dated from the tenth century or so, I seem to remember being told. Old Man Littlewood, Vivian’s and Saul’s grandfather, bought it and had it shipped over here, on barges I guess. He was caught—” Simon paused. He had been distracted by a snuffling noise; it was faint and distant and something about it struck him as very odd. Somehow his mind couldn’t simply dismiss it as a noise made by a dog. He thought of bears, which of course were not a reasonable possibility in Illinois.

“What is it, Si?”

“Did you hear anything?”

Margie turned her head, seemingly sniffing the air. “No.”

“It was nothing, I guess.” And now a dog, a real dog, was barking frantically; but very far away, no doubt on one of the nearby farms. Simon stared upward at the gray walls again.

“What were you going to say about their grandfather?”

“There was some kind of fire or explosion here one night and he was killed. That was before I was born, I think.”

And he led the way on up. Now the path, working its way across a hillside grown stony, almost a cliff, grew steep enough to require very careful footwork in a couple of places. Anyone not reasonably agile and confident might feel better clambering on all fours at these spots, and even an athlete might reach for a nearby branch or treetrunk as an aid to steadiness. At the trickiest climbing turn, a wooden handrail that Simon remembered had now disappeared. Only the wooden roots of it were barely visible, like decayed tooth-stumps in the rich mossy soil.

And here in places the limestone bones of the earth stuck out, their naturally squarish shapes serving the climber briefly as stairs. He’d once hurt a toe on one of them, Simon remembered… but right now he didn’t want to dwell on that previous ascent; that whole mysterious day. Right now he and Margie were here as workers with a job to do. It was probably the only way he could ever have brought himself to come back here at all; and he had long wanted to come back, to face certain things again, to try to rediscover them… Simon was in good physical shape, he took pains to stay that way, but still his breath had quickened with the climb… as he’d felt it quicken on that other, mysterious day…

When the path bent in it’s fourth switchback Simon looked down again toward the landing. He wanted to make sure that the canoe was still there. The screen of intervening greenery was now much thicker, but he could still see glints of aluminum. And the kid…

For just a moment, when the breeze stirred intervening branches in the proper way, Simon caught a glimpse of dark human hair, tanned human skin. For just a moment he saw clearly, though only partially, the figure he had glimpsed on the island, beckoning. It was Vivian, naked, waiting for him.

Margie was looking down too, doubtless trying to see what had so interested Simon. He moved back a step to stand for a moment with closed eyes. He swore to himself with silent savagery that he was not going to let his eyes or his mind or whatever it was play tricks on him. Never again. Could there be something about this place, this physical location, something chemical or atmospheric that brought on hallucinations, at least in certain susceptible people? How was he ever going to be able to sort out the truth, the fantasy, the dream, about his last days here if even now he was still subject to—

Simon opened his eyes. Margie was watching him with curiosity, but all she said was: “Looks like our guide’s still waiting for us.”

“I couldn’t see too well through all the branches. What did you—?”

Still her eyes probed at Simon. “He’s still sitting there reading. That’s about all I could make out.”

“Ah.” Simon nodded, and faced uphill again, and climbed. Toward a real meeting with Vivian. Just as on that unforgettable day when he’d climbed alone. All he could really think about, then or now, was her. He wondered now if anything about that damned crazy experience had been real. Damn her, damn her anyway. He was suddenly angry at Vivian, angrier than he had ever suspected he might become at this late date. Whatever had really happened to him on that day fifteen years ago, it was a wonder that it hadn’t done him permanent psychological damage.

And maybe it had. Simon knew a sudden chilled feeling deep in his gut. Maybe it had. Could it have anything to do with his being still unmarried?

Of course there were a lot of people, no more damaged than anyone else, who for one reason or another just didn’t want to get married. Margie was one. Simon deliberately fell back a step to watch her climb ahead of him, her trim body moving smoothly in jeans and longsleeved shirt. Her evening’s costume, along with a few other items that might be useful, was in her shoulder bag.

They had reached the fifth, penultimate switchback of the path. Here just as it approached the turn the path sloped briefly downward. Looking up from here you could see the tall hedge, almost as impenetrable as a wall, that marked off the rear of the castle grounds proper from the surrounding woods. From this angle the hedge was tall enough to block sight of the forbidding stone walls beyond it. At the tip of the switchback loop Simon halted momentarily. From this point a branching path, even fainter than the one they followed, went off on a level course to the right. After going a few yards in that direction it curved around a protruding limestone shoulder of the bluff and vanished completely. Not, Simon realized, that the branching path was still really visible at all; it was just that he knew that it was there.

He glanced round quickly. As far as he could tell, Margie and he were still utterly alone. Then he quickly led her along the unseen trail to the right. Not only had grass and weeds completely overgrown the way during the last fifteen years, but now the new branches of small trees had to be put aside. And here in the deeper shade were more mosquitoes.

Simon moved around a second limestone shoulder, perhaps thirty yards from the place where the pathways had branched. And came to a stop. At least he knew now that he hadn’t dreamed or imagined this part. Before them was the grotto, and the cave.

Within and against the natural limestone face of the cliff, the two concentric arches of the grotto had been constructed so that a natural small cave was at their center. It had all been done in the time of Grandfather Littlewood, of course, along with the rest of the construction. A knee-high rustic wall of stone surrounded the small area paved with flagstones before the grotto, an area centered on a stone construction that Simon in his earlier childhood had taken for a simple picnic table. He couldn’t remember the first time that he had seen it; but he couldn’t forget the last. He approached this central tabular structure now and stood staring down at it, for the moment oblivious to all else. It was a little less than waist high, built solidly of stones that on second glance were not quite the same in color and texture as the flags below, or the castle walls of which one corner was now partially visible through greenery above. The top of the table was flat, circular, and perhaps eight feet across. In its center, as if to provide the only reason for its existence, was mounted an ancient-looking sundial, a spherical cage of green-patinaed metal; probably copper, thought Simon now. An all but completely illegible inscription ran round the sundial’s metal base.

Simon didn’t look long at the dial or its inscription, though. On the flat stones of the tabletop faint brownish stains were visible. There was no telling how old the stains were or what had made them.

“What weird statues, Si.”

He looked up; he had actually managed to forget the statues, along with piled clamshells and much else. There were six or eight pieces, mostly life size, cast concrete or carved marble, disposed on pedestals made for them around the little paved court before the grotto. Staring at a crude, figleafed imitation of Michaelangelo’s David, he said: “The story goes that there was an artists’ colony of some kind in the woods near here, when Old Man Littlewood was putting up his house. He just about bought out their stock of things they’d done for practice, stuff that was heavy and hard to move and that no one else wanted to buy. He didn’t want it in the house, evidently, but it was good enough for decoration out here in this… whatever this is… out here in the woods.”

“They’re weird.”

“Yeah. Let’s get to work.” The grotto at the cliff face was about ten feet deep, if you were to have measured it from the outer of its two concentric arches to the heavy iron grillwork, like a jail door, that closed off the twisted mouth of the natural cave. The cave mouth was almost too small for an adult to enter anyway, and when looked at from the outside gave no indication of being any bigger farther in. The grillwork door was guarded on each side by a piece of fantastic statuary. When Simon moved up to the door for a close look it was obvious that no one had opened it for some time, and he muttered his satisfaction. The chain and small padlock holding it shut were both rusted, probably enough so that he could have broken them with relative ease. He pulled on the door, tentatively, swinging it through the few inches of play given it by the chain, creating a small aperture through which his adult body could never be made to pass. Then he decided on a more subtle way than breakage.

“Pass me the tool kit, Marge.” Escape work, opening locks, was not his strongest act. But he had dabbled.

Margie dug into her shoulder bag and pulled out the packet of folded cloth, the size of a billfold. It opened to show pockets filled with a jeweler’s, or an escape artist’s, selection of instruments. Simon selected a small pick and went to work. The lock didn’t look terribly expensive or difficult.

Meanwhile Margie retreated to stand just inside the mouth of the grotto, on watch, looking out and listening. Once she turned to ask him in a whisper: “Did you hear something?”

He paused, ready to be irritated at the interruption, but still believing that she would not have interrupted him for any commonplace sound. He listened, but could hear nothing out of the ordinary. “Maybe a bird?” he suggested. “Some animal in the woods?”

Margie shrugged. Simon went back to work. The cheap lock gave up after only a couple of minutes, unrusted parts of its shackle sliding into view. With a mutter of triumph he undid the chain and set it down; and now, with a minimum of skreeking, the jail door could be swung open. A few spider webs tore soundlessly. Inside lay blown dust and dead leaves, untrodden.

When Margie had got herself wedged into the cave mouth with him, he closed the door again behind them both, and re-wrapped the chain as convincingly as possible. He secured its links with the lock, which he almost closed. “Now,” he said.

Margie had already repacked the tool kit, and now had a tiny flashlight ready. With this in hand Simon led the way into the cave. It was a way along which progress at first looked hopeless; it seemed that you must run into a wall before you had gone more than the length of your body. But around the first corner the light already shone into deep blackness, showing where a small natural crevice had been carved wider. Simon went down on all fours and inched and scraped his way ahead, with Margie groping at his heels. He slid down, deeper into the hillside. A moment later they could both stand up.

“Wow,” whispered Margie. “I’m starting to believe your story.”

The passage was too narrow for more than one person at a time, but adequately high. From here it snaked slowly upward through the hill, presumably following some path of least resistance through the rock. It darkened briefly to almost pitch blackness, then brightened again somewhat as they approached the outlet of an air-and-light shaft that pierced the solid stone roof ahead. The outlet of the vent at or above ground level was obviously very well concealed in some way; Simon had never had an opportunity to try to learn where or how. The last time he’d come this way, he hadn’t had a flashlight with him; he could recall groping and stumbling; and he told himself now that those memories at least had to be real enough.

The secret way did not continue underground for very long. After fifteen yards or so, and one more small vent for light and air, they reached a steep, short flight of stairs, cut out of the native limestone just like the rest of the passage. Then, when they had climbed about ten steps, walls and stair alike became construction instead of carving. The passage had brought them up within the main castle walls themselves, twelve feet in thickness at the base.

Here the way was as narrow as before, and still quite dim. The air was fresh-smelling, but considerably cooler than outdoors. Unexpectedly, a branching passage appeared, twisting away to one side and again downward; Simon remembered the branch but hadn’t explored it before, and wasn’t going to check it out just now; maybe a little later, if everything else went well.

Another stair. At its top, natural light, dim but adequate for movement, was coming in through one side of the passage. Simon flicked off the penlight and gestured Margie to silence. At the top of the stair they stood together, looking out. On this side of the passage a deep niche built into its stone wall terminated in an actual window, covered with a thick wood screen through which only a few small holes remained open. Heads side by side in the recess, they each put eye to hole and found themselves looking out into what Simon remembered as the great hall of the castle. It was certainly a vast chamber, whose size was difficult to estimate in this constricted view; but from this strategically placed spyhole almost all of it was visible. In the enormous fireplace a huge spit turned, and the smell of roasting meat confirmed that, some sizable animal was indeed being roasted whole. A long, crude trestle table, the chief article of furniture, was dwarfed by the size of the room around it. At the moment no people were in sight; the spit was being turned electrically, a cord from a small motor running to an outlet in the gray stone wall, as incongruous as it was inconspicuous.

Simon turned his head, putting lips to Margie’s ear. “This panel should open from in here if you push it. This is where you’ll come out. Think you can squeeze through?”

She pulled back, looked at the dimensions of the window in the stone. “A little tight. I can manage, though, if it doesn’t tear the damn gauzy costume off. How far down is the floor out there?”

Simon looked again, estimated. “I think just about the same as the surface we’re standing on in here. I’ll look it over from the other side, tonight, before I give you the final signal at dinner. Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll give it my best shot.”

“Good guy,” said Simon, and kissed her gently on one ear. Margie had fits of women’s lib of varying intensity, and being called girl sometimes caused an argument.

“If this works, you’ll be a good guy yourself. If it doesn’t…”

“We’ve got an upper level to check out,” Simon whispered. Flicking on the penlight again, he led her to and up another flight of stairs. This was steep and went up a long way. At the top of this the passage, now so narrow that even Margie scraped both side as she passed, ran level for a considerable distance. At intervals of a few yards more niches were built into the wall, on the same side, again with spots of indirect light filtering through them. These spy windows were quite low down in the wall, and each of them gave into a separate bedroom, four or five in all. Peering into one of these rooms after another, Simon and Margie found them empty of people but all furnished and apparently ready for use. The passage they were in still followed the outer wall of the castle, and the windows in the bedrooms were under their feet. In a couple of the rooms luggage had already been deposited.

At the spyhole to the last bedroom, Simon indicated a division in the section of paneling that showed through the stone window. “Give a push here and it should swing open, if for any reason you have to get out this way.” It was always good to have some kind of fall-back plan.

“Like looking for the ladies’ room, maybe. It’s only about two o’clock now—I could be in here another six hours or so, and then have to go right into the act.”

“I guess I didn’t think…”

“I’ll cope. I’m resourceful.”

“Sure you will.” Simon kissed her, quickly but with real affection. They had been working together and occasionally sleeping together for a year now, and sometimes he thought that something permanent had grown between them and then again he didn’t know. He turned away, then back. “Here, you’ll need the flashlight. Almost forgot.”

“Can you grope your way out?”

“No problem.” And he was on his way; in moments at the top of the uppermost stair, down which he felt his way on his soft-soled shoes.

The first part of the trip out was uneventful. It was as if every foot of the way had already been engraved upon his memory. But when he had got as far as the branching tunnel in the base of the wall he was surprised to see that light was filtering upward very faintly from the branch. Probably just the penlight in his hand had been enough to mask it when they were on the way up. Simon paused, watching. The light was possessed by a tiny flicker, as if its source were flame. Before he left Margie alone in the tunnel system, he ought to check this out.

Down a short turning stair in the branch tunnel, and he came to what surprised him, a real door. It was made of crude wood that seemed to fit with the rest of the decor, and was swung partly ajar, out into a sizable stone room with stone-flagged floor. In the room a torch in a wrought-iron wall scone burned dimly, making the illumination that had drawn Simon here. Against the wall not far from the torch there stood on two legs a metal object that Simon at first took for a suit of armor. It took him a few moments’ staring in the dim light to realize that it was some kind of iron maiden, a complex instrument of torture.

At best the old man had had a bizarre sense of humor. Whatever this sub-basement was being used for now, the open door, the torch, meant that it was certainly being used for something, and that what Simon had thought were the secret passageways were known. He would have to go back and get Margie and get out. But first he was going to try to find out exactly what…

When he peered cautiously round the edge of the door, the whole room, or almost all of it, was visible. Besides the iron maiden, other peculiar instruments stood about in it. Most notably a bed-like rack, with great spoked wheels made to give leverage for disjointing the victim’s limbs. And the rack was occupied…

Simon stepped back, closed eyes and rubbed them, mumbled something halfway between a prayer and a curse, then stepped forward and looked again. The rack was occupied by the naked body of an old man, gray-whiskered, paunchy, whose wrists and ankles were bound to the machine by the provided heavy straps, and who looked as if he were not dead but certainly unconscious.

Moving without conscious volition, Simon pushed the door open farther and stepped out into the room. Eyes fixed on the rack and its occupant, he moved forward slowly. He’d been working up to an hallucination like this one all afternoon, and now it was here, and he was almost glad, knowing that it couldn’t possibly be real.

The old man was quite motionless except for gentle, faintly snoring breathing. A small rope of saliva trailed from one corner of his mouth. The leather strap holding one of his arms felt like a taut strap when Simon touched it, and the old man’s forearm, puffed slightly by the tight bond, certainly felt like flesh. But this couldn’t be—

Simon started to take a step backward, and without warning a strangling grip clamped on him from behind. His neck was caught, one arm pinioned. He could no longer breathe and his head was going to burst and he knew that in a moment more he would be dead.