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

his interest, closed it, and put it back up on the shelf. “How come this house has a kid’s room in it, anyway?”

      Camilla took him by the arm, tugging him out of the room. She said: “Looks to me like his wife must have had a little girl.”

      Jake let himself be tugged. He tried to picture Tyrrell as a father. Oddly, it seemed possible.

* * *

      Back in the main room of the house, Jake sat looking at the calendar on the kitchen wall, which still maintained that this was June of 1932.

      Camilla saw him staring at the calendar. “What year was it, Jake? When you came in here?”

      Jake turned his staring gaze at her. “Whaddya mean what year was it? This is nineteen thirty-five. I came in here only—a few days ago.” The frightening thought returned maybe it really had been a month. Maybe even longer. Raising a hand, he rubbed his chin; it was quite definitely bearded now.

      He demanded: “What year did Tyrrell bring you in? Last year? Nineteen thirty-four?”

      “Jake you’re wrong by thirty years. Thirty-one. I met him in Flagstaff in nineteen sixty-five.”

* * *

      Tyrrell, as far as his two breathing victims could determine was practically indifferent to time—or if he kept time, it was only by some method of his own.

      Jake noticed, however, that the old man was usually willing to talk about time. In fact it was one subject on which he tended to speak compulsively. Time, he once told Jake, hardly mattered to him, as long as he felt confident of being able to access the mundane world in at least the approximate era that he wanted.

* * *

      Jake and Camilla continued sharing the house and the single adult bed. But only in the hours of daylight, shortly after dawn or before sunset, did they any longer make love, with a passion that had grown fierce and somehow hopeless.

      Few nights passed during which the master did not summon Camilla to accompany him into the cave.

      Once when Jake, driven by anguish, dared to demand a reason, the old man said with a wicked laugh that he wanted her to model for him.

* * *

      Jake, knowing what he would see if he followed the pair, now usually remained in the house when Camilla was summoned. For hours he paced restlessly from one room to another, on the verge of doing something desperate—and more than likely suicidal.

      Eventually, after an hour or so, Camilla would return to him. And now she refused to talk at all about what had happened between her and Tyrrell.

      Several times she came back from these midnight excursions dreamy-eyed and looking openly happy, and Jake knew a sudden anguished impulse to murder her.

      It troubled him also that she had now begun to sleep most of the day, in a troubled and exhausted fashion, and to be restless and wakeful during the night, as if waiting for the vampire’s summons.

      The next time that Jake tried to talk to Camilla about killing Tyrrell, she put him off, saying she was too tired.

* * * * * *

      How much time had really passed since he had been confined in this strange world, Jake could no longer even attempt to guess. But there came a day when he again was walking out of doors, beside the creek, with Camilla, feeling relatively safe in morning sunlight.

      When he returned to full awareness of where he was and what he was doing—returned from a waking dream of something horrible—he heard himself pronouncing the words: “Then we’ll get him with wood.”

      Camilla, for the moment looking no different than on the day he had first met her, strolled beside him, shaded as usual by her sunglasses and hat. She said: “Can’t, not while he’s awake. You’ve seen how strong he is, how fast he can move.”

      “If we could only get into that place where he sleeps,” said Jake. Then he stopped suddenly, standing at the canyon wall a hundred yards away with red unseeing eyes. “Dynamite,” he whispered, to himself.

* * *

      The planning went on, intermittently.

      “There’s fire. You say that fire hurt him too.”

      Camilla nodded slowly.

      Fire made Jake think of gasoline or diesel fuel, or kerosene. None of the first two were here in the Deep Canyon, but there was certainly kerosene, stored for the household lamps in a fifty-gallon drum that lay on its side in a homemade rack under a cottonwood some thirty yards or so behind the house. Presumably Tyrrell brought in more, somehow, from time to time.

      As for the dynamite, Jake knew that Tyrrell had some stored for use in his quarrying. And Jake had learned something of the uses of fuses and blasting caps in his CCC work building trails. Edgar kept the dynamite locked up, but Jake looking at the little shed, didn’t see any reason why it couldn’t be broken open.

      “Maybe if we did it that way, we could still burn him up back there in his den. Even if the dynamite doesn’t get him, or it doesn’t open up the rock as neatly as we’d want it to.”

      No matter how they tried, any other ways of killing this monster were harder to imagine. Camilla swore repeatedly that the shooting she had witnessed had had no effect, and Jake, after what he’d now seen of Tyrrell with his own eyes, was ready to believe her.

      Jake could think of no way to trap the evil one out in the bright sunlight. Could he possibly reflect sunlight in on him somehow when he was in his den? They’d need two or three big mirrors, which they didn’t have, and then just hope it worked. That idea was too impractical even to mention to Camilla.

* * *

      Jake demanded crazily: “Are you going to tell him, the next time he bites you in the neck? Tell him that we want him dead?”

      Camilla shuddered and said she was revolted at the thought of doing that. She pleaded with