A Question Of Time Fred Saberhagen (reading the story of the .TXT) 📖

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 be 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, 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 kept coming 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