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

apparently paying no attention to either Jake or Camilla. A few seconds later, the figure of the old man disappeared.

      Jake looked around, dazed, in the slowly increasing light. There was only Camilla, sobbing, with him now.

      Jake could see the little blood-beads on the whiteness of her throat.

* * *

      Leaning on each other for support, the two of them made their way slowly back to the house. Into the bedroom, where their clothes were still scattered about. Where their master, as Jake now fully realized, could enter any time he chose.

* * *

      There was no hope, no thought, of getting back to sleep, no effort at it. Half an hour after coming back to the house, sitting at the table in the main room, pretending to drink coffee, Camilla suddenly said to Jake: “I think he wants you to get me pregnant.”

      Jake goggled at her. “What? Why’d he want that?”

      “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Then she gripped Jake by the arm. “When he had me back inside that little room…”

      “Yeah?”

      “The two of us weren’t alone. There was someone else in there too.”

      “What?”

      “Someone—or something.”

      Jake remembered the vague form he had seen with his flashlight, in the course of his earlier exploration of the cave. He could feel his scalp creep. “What’s that mean?”

      “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Jake, get me out of here! GET ME OUT!”

* * *

      Jake had no answer ready for that demand.

      In an hour or two, leaving Camilla, fully clothed again, lying sleepless on their bed, he shuffled back to the cave, where he got to work, once again following orders to mine nodules of the nameless white rock. There was nothing else that he could do, and the labor at least gave him some way to occupy his time.

      And for Jake the really crazy part, the part that made him think that maybe he’d gone around the bend himself, was yet to come.

      It came that evening, an hour after sunset, when he found himself once more standing with the vampire-sculptor at the workbench. It came for Jake as he stood there with old Edgar, and heard himself talking calmly about tools and rocks, weights and shapes, almost as if the horrors, sexual and otherwise, of the night before had never happened.

      Jake, watching the old man handle the rocks, seeing him shatter Vishnu schist with hard blows of his metal tools, could only marvel again at the master’s strength and skill. Despite his fear and hatred, he could almost feel himself starting to develop enthusiasm for this project.

* * * * * *

      For the second night in a row Jake’s and Camilla’s bedroom was invaded without warning; this time Jake slept through the intrusion as if he had been drugged. He was not aware of what was happening until Camilla was already gone. Then, hurriedly throwing on his clothes, he followed her and her abductor to the cave, which was once more dark and silent.

      The scene of the night before was re-enacted, with minor variations in detail. Once more the old man forced the young woman back into a corner of the inner chamber, where Jake could see only a small part of what was happening. Once more, more strongly than before, Jake got the impression that Camilla was at least on the way to becoming a completely willing partner in this act—whatever it might be exactly.

      And this time, peering into the inner chamber of the cave, Jake got a better look at the third presence there, as insubstantial but as real as light.

      He could see the whitish, translucent shape, whatever it was, move in such as way as to suggest that it was enveloping Camilla’s body and like the old man nursing at her veins. While this was happening, the old man withdrew himself as far as the small size of the inner room permitted.

      Then he stepped forward again…

      Jake carried away with him the very distinct impression of having seen three forms locked in an orgiastic embrace.

* * *

      Headed back to the house again with Jake, minutes after sunrise, Camilla said: “Jake, lover, if he keeps on doing that to me…” She let the sentence trail away.

      Jake could imagine half a dozen outcomes if it went on. None of the ghastly pictures evoked in his mind were coherent, but each seemed more horrible than all the others.

      “We can’t let him keep on,” he said. Then he added, as if in afterthought: “We’ve got to kill him.”

      Those last five words just hung in the air. He had pronounced them quite easily and naturally, as he might have said that they needed more firewood.

      Almost casually, Camilla was nodding a silent agreement. “And even so, I don’t know that he’s the worst thing we’ve got to be afraid of.”

* * *

      For a long time after they returned to the house that morning, Jake and Camilla sat in two chairs at the table, saying little, doing nothing.

      For a while, perversely and frighteningly, she was in a mood to giggle and tease Jake—as if getting free from Tyrrell’s control was, after all, the last thing she had in mind.

      “Oooh, are you jealous, Jakey?” She pouted, mock-pleading in the tones of baby talk. “Don’t ooo be jealous? Old Edgar’s not a bit jealous of ooo!”

      At last he jumped up without answering her and ran out of the house, going to his work. When she brought him his lunch, sometime past midday, she was sober and serious again.

Chapter Twelve

      The time at the Greenwich meridian, only ten minutes of longitude east of London, was two minutes past midnight, the penultimate day of the old year just beginning. The man who in Arizona had called himself Strangeways was now standing alone in the darkened parlor of a large Kentish country house, perhaps a quarter of a mile from the center of the village of Down.

      For many years no one had lived in this house. But for some forty