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

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