A Question Of Time Read online

  Back in the main part of the house, Brainard kicked aside an Indian rug, revealing a trapdoor. Unlatching and raising this door exposed darkness underfoot, and timber piers on which the building was supported. Attached to one of these log columns, a wooden ladder went down twelve or fifteen feet to a worn spot on the rocky ground, from which a barely visible trail descended the steep slope.

  “It’d be easy,” Brainard muttered, “for someone to come up this way, and set fire to the place.”

  “I’ll put at least one man down here,” Joe assured him. “Don’t worry.”

  In five minutes, Joe had some people posted. John Southerland was out on the paved and civilized walk along the rim. Expecting that diplomacy would be at least as important as athletic ability in dealing with anyone who approached the house openly, from this direction, Joe put his most experienced and trusted man here. John was standing in a strategically chosen place where he remained shadowed from the streetlights, and from which he could see anyone who approached the house from the front.

  Joe himself went down with Bill to the slope just below the house. “Let’s figure,” said Joe in a low voice, “that the hour after sunset may be the most dangerous.”

  “Why?” asked Bill, with interest.

  Joe ignored the question. “So we’ll set a double guard for an hour or so. You on one side of the path, me on the other.”

  Bill quietly told Joe that he wished he had had a chance to scout the terrain out in daylight. But there just hadn’t been time.

  Joe, earlier in the day, had had the opportunity to look over the steep slope. Now he did what he could to describe the lay of the land to Bill.

  “Main thing to remember is that it’s a long way down, and that it’s steep. The trails going down all switchback, and there are some really sheer dropoffs.”

  “I can believe all that,” Bill responded. What little he could see now of the terrain strongly suggested that the spot of level ground where they were standing was only a small ledge.

  Neither man had used his flashlight yet. With the lingering traces of daylight baffled by persistent clouds of mist, the awesome dimensions of the Canyon remained concealed—though the mist was now beginning to sink into the depths.

  Joe pointed. “I’ll be right over there, about thirty yards. The tree with a long branch that looks like an arm?”

  “Right.”

  “Got your radio?”

  “Check.”

  “Flashlight?”

  “Check. Also camera, though I don’t know what good that’s going to do.”

  * * *

  Hardly had Joe taken up his own position on the fast-darkening mountainside below the house, on the other side of the almost non-existent trail, when he gave a nervous start, and then relaxed. The man calling himself Strangeways had suddenly materialized, almost at Joe’s side and seemingly out of nothing but the dusk itself.

  By way of greeting, Joe said in a low voice: “I thought you’d want me to invite you into the Tyrrell House. Just in case you feel you have to get in there later.”

  The other shook his head. There was tension, and an uncharacteristic suggestion of unease in the way he stood, first with arms folded, then with hands clasped behind his back.

  “My presence on the scene just now would be disruptive, Joseph. And once in the house, I would leave traces of my presence there, a spoor some unfriendly agent could detect … were you given a warm welcome by the family?”

  “I’d say a mixed welcome. If you can call those two people a family.” Tersely Joe recounted the main points of his conversation with Sarah Tyrrell and his impressions of her and her nephew.

  Strangeways heard him out with interest. Then he said: “I am in general agreement with what the lady told you about her husband. And after a preliminary investigation I think it highly probable that the missing girl is still alive—somewhere. But where I do not know. Perhaps nearby, as the great-aunt says. I very much doubt whether the young lady is capable of returning to her relatives at will.”

  “I have grave doubts of that myself.”

  “Then can we agree on this as well: that perhaps others besides the girl are in grave, though probably not immediate, danger?”

  “You mean besides Brainard with his gambling debts?” Joe asked. “No, I don’t have any reason to think so. But if you do…”

  “I do. And I am beginning to think,” Strangeways added after a pause, “that the search for a true solution must begin far away from the Grand Canyon—yes, far indeed.”

  “How far?” Joe asked in surprise.

  “In England.”

  Joe scowled into the thickening dusk, wishing again that it had been possible to give all his people a look at the real Canyon in the daylight before they went on guard. Even he himself felt unprepared, though at least he had been here once before, as an innocent tourist, many years ago.

  Then, almost unwillingly, he looked back at his companion. “What does England have to do with this?”

  “For one thing, it is the birthplace of Edgar Tyrrell. According to my informants, his birthplace in each phase of his life, if you take my meaning. There he drew his first breath, I believe some time around the middle of the nineteenth century—and it was in the same land, some two or three decades later, that he drew his last. I hope to be able to tell you much more on that subject, Joseph, when I return.”

  “Wait a minute—” Joe paused. He had been about to say You can’t just leave—but he had caught himself in time; he really didn’t want to give this man the impression that he, Joe, was trying to forbid him to do anything.

  “What do you expect is going to happen here tonight?” Joe finally asked instead.

  Strangeways shrugged, as if he did not consider the question of paramount importance. “Probably nothing that is beyond your competence to deal with.” Then, with an elegant gesture, he added: “I can assure you that no one of those now present in the house is nosferatu. But you have undoubtedly been able to see that for yourself.”

  Joe nodded. “But it seems that old Tyrrell definitely is.” Whistling silently between his teeth, Joe tried to ponder the implications. He wasn’t sure that he could see all of them.

  His companion nodded. “But I doubt that he is going to visit the house tonight … so far, I have deliberately avoided contact with his wife. Most likely I will talk to her when I return from England.”

  Joe went on: “You think young Catherine may have somehow become the victim of her great-uncle? Her great-uncle by adoption. A pretty distant relationship.”

  The other let out a faintly reptilian sigh. “I fear the girl may indeed be a victim. But under what circumstances I do not know.”

  “Has she been … will she be nosferatu too?”

  Strangeways shook his head. “When we find her, we will know what she is. What she may have become. And Joseph…”

  “Yeah.”

  “I sense that somewhere, not far from where we stand, at least one presence even more intriguing than Mr. Tyrrell is waiting to be discovered … however, my instincts warn me to approach this whole problem cautiously. This is a time for subtlety.”

  On that note Strangeways turned to leave, then turned back with an afterthought. “Joseph, I am not abandoning you.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t think you were,” he answered truthfully. “But you are leaving me in a hell of a state of ignorance.”

  Strangeways shrugged, a businesslike gesture. “Regrettably I must, being still in that state myself. But I foresee no disaster here tonight. No problem, as I say, beyond your considerable competence to handle. But I do advise you to exercise restraint and caution until I return, which will be in as few days as I can manage it. In the meantime, commit no rash acts. In particular I advise against your attempting to track this particular vampire to his earth—not that I really think you mean to do so, or that you would find it possible.”

  Joe nodded. Then he blinked. The path beside him was suddenly empty of any h
uman presence, emptied in a way that had nothing directly to do with gathering darkness, or with fog. He had seen nosferatu come and go in similar fashion often enough so that it was no longer really a surprise; but even so it was always something of a shock.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, up in the house, Maria was telling Mrs. Tyrrell, truthfully, what a lovely place she thought the house was, how wonderful it must have been to be able to live here.

  Old Sarah smiled understandingly, and thanked Maria, but it was plain that the old lady did not completely agree. Although she admitted it was a lovely house, and had cost Edgar a great amount of work to build.

  “Each room has its own fireplace, and these are still the only means of heating. The Park Service has made a few changes; they put in simple basic plumbing decades ago.”

  According to Mrs. Tyrrell, much of the furniture in the House dated from the thirties. Some of the simple chairs, tables, and benches were fairly valuable, she told Maria, because Tyrrell had built them with his own hands.

  * * *

  A minute or two after his extraordinary colleague had disappeared—Joe thought it highly likely that the man calling himself Strangeways was already on his way, by one mode of transportation or another, to England—Joe cautiously made his way over to where Bill Burdon was posted, just to see how Bill was doing.

  “Everything under control, chief. Did I hear you talking to someone else just now?”

  “Strangeways. He’s gone now.”

  Bill shook his head, impressed. “He can sure move quietly.”

  Joe let that pass without comment. “I’m going back into the house now. Someone will be out to relieve you in an hour or so.”

  “Check.”

  Moving as quietly as he could, Joe climbed the trail leading up under the house. He had more questions to ask, and Bill had so far given every indication of being steady and reliable.

  As Joe approached the house from below, he murmured into his radio. Moments later, looking up from the foot of the ladder, he saw Maria open the trapdoor for him. On the level above her a door was standing slightly open inside the house, letting enough light through from the upper floors for Joe to see to climb.

  “Anything new?” he asked Maria, as she closed and latched the trapdoor behind him.

  “Only that this house contains about a thousand fossils, and a million Indian arrowheads and things. When you look at it closely, it’s quite a museum, though I guess none of the stuff that’s left here is really valuable.”

  “Must have been here for decades.”

  “Joe?”

  “Yeah?”

  Maria looked around as if to make sure that they were quite alone. “About your brother-in-law?”

  “What about him?”

  “Just that I noticed both of his little fingers are missing.”

  “You’re observant.”

  “Well, it’s none of my business, of course, but I was just wondering how that happened.”

  Joe gave the young woman a level, thoughtful look. “A vampire pulled them off,” he told her at last. “When John was sixteen.”

  Maria’s lip curled slightly. “All right, Boss, just asking. I admitted it was none of my business.”

  “Ask John if you don’t believe me.”

  * * *

  Following a silent Maria back upstairs, Joe noticed a few trophy heads of big game, deer and mountain lion primarily, like those decorating the lobby at El Tovar.

  In a small room on the middle level of the house they encountered another scattering of Indian artifacts, pottery and arrowheads and little figures woven of twists of bark.

  Sarah joined them here. “Well, Mr. Keogh?”

  “We’re watching the house, front and rear, Mrs. Tyrrell.”

  “My nephew will be relieved. Now, I think, we can begin to discuss the matter of my grandniece.”

  “Yes, I think we’d better.” Joe leaned against a log wall, watching the old lady carefully. “Mrs. Tyrrell, did you leave your husband or did he leave you, back in the thirties?”

  “I left him,” Sarah answered after a moment.

  “Why?”

  “You should ask, rather, why I stayed with him so long.”

  “All right, why did you?”

  “I loved him, I suppose. Do you know, Mr. Keogh, the age of the oldest rocks in the bottom of the Canyon?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Maria, obviously not understanding any of this, was still watching and listening carefully.

  Sarah Tyrrell said: “Some of the oldest exposed rocks on earth are down there—notably the Vishnu Schist, almost two billion years old, metamorphosed from ocean sediments. That intrigued Edgar from the start, you see; something that had been made an infinity of ages before there ever was a Canyon.”

  “Mrs. Tyrrell, does this have something to do with—?”

  “Yes, it does, Mr. Keogh. The whole matter is a question of time, you see, and of the efforts people make to deal with time and to control it. In that Edgar is far more successful than most.”

  Maria was squinting at the old woman in total incomprehension.

  Sarah went on: “Down there is also something called the Great Unconformity—not a layer of rock, but rather an absence of layers, somewhat more than half a billion years old, that might be expected to be present. In among those absent strata, somehow, is where Edgar built another house—and in that house I refused to live.”

  Joe was nodding, as if he understood at least partially. “Did you have any children?”

  “What does that matter now?”

  Joe stared at her a moment more, and then gave up. “I don’t know. Just curious. Let’s get back to Cathy. You told me you think she’s in a place nearby.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “Where is that place, Mrs. Tyrrell?”

  “To reach it, Mr. Keogh, I think you must be capable of finding it for yourself. I cannot tell you how—nor can I any longer show you. I am too old, and my heart too tired and my legs too weak for canyon trails.”

  * * *

  Several hours after sunset, all was quiet in the Tyrrell House and its immediate vicinity. Maria, established in a comfortable chair near one of the bedroom fireplaces, found herself having to fight to keep from nodding off after a long day.

  Sarah had made no objection to Maria’s sitting in that chair. From there Maria found it easy to keep an eye on Sarah while the old lady, in the next room with the door open, tried to get some sleep.

  “Shall I stay in the room with you, Mrs. Tyrrell?”

  “There’s no need for that, girl. I’m not the one in danger.”

  And Maria, on the verge of sleep, saw, or at last thought she saw, in firelight or candlelight, movement from one of Tyrrell’s carvings.

  The impression became a dream, a dream in which the horror was still too remote to cause her to awaken …

  Joe, downstairs in the studio and looking out of a window, observed that night had by now almost completely darkened the mist-filled Canyon.

  He thought to himself: No use in a breather trying to look for someone, anyone, down there tonight.

  Not that he had any intention of doing that.

  Chapter Five

  Bill Burdon was standing just where he had been posted, close beside a gnarled juniper, just a few yards down into the Canyon from the lowest level of the Tyrrell House. In his carefully chosen position the small tree shadowed him from the moon as well as from the nearer lights up on the rim, while a long section of the nearby trail lay exposed in moonlight for his inspection. He doubted very much that anyone approaching the Tyrrell House from below by any route would be able to see him, or get past him without being seen.

  Bill, who considered himself good at this kind of thing, had no trouble remaining patient and keeping quiet. At intervals he changed position. When he went so far as to sit down, very carefully, on the ground, he congratulated himself on managing the change without making a sound.

  It looked lik
e he was in for a long, dull night, with no reason to really expect any action. Joe had told him he’d be relieved in a few hours, but Bill was already beginning to wonder if he was going to find it a problem to keep awake.

  To keep alert, Bill turned over in his mind the distinguishing features of the case. He had to admit that perhaps number one was that here was an old lady with lots of money, one of her relatives missing and another one nervous, and if she wanted to spend some of her wealth hiring detectives, it wasn’t the detectives’ business to discourage her.

  Distinguishing feature number two might be that old Sarah Tyrrell really seemed to think that some kind of psychic connection existed between her and her grandniece, and that young Cathy stood in some kind of occult peril. That led Bill to wonder why anyone should accept ordinary-looking Joe Keogh from Chicago as an expert in the field of solving psychic mysteries. It was more than Bill could understand. Joe didn’t seem at all the type—

  Bill was alerted by a faint sound. Some thirty yards downslope from where he sat, something of roughly human size was moving. Bill’s right arm raised his dark flashlight, thumb resting on the switch that would turn it on. Presently a middle-sized mule deer came far enough out into the moonlight to let Bill see its big ears cupped in his direction. A moment later, the animal was gone downslope again, even more quietly than it had come.

  Bill lowered the light, still unused. All right, back to the case. Another of its peculiarities, at least in Bill Burdon’s admittedly inexperienced opinion, was Mr. Strangeways, who certainly had something odd about him. This peculiarity was hard to define, but Bill wouldn’t have especially related it to the occult. Well, Keogh had given his temporary employees fair warning that he wasn’t necessarily going to tell them everything about how he ran his business. And in the business of security and investigations, Bill had already learned, you had to expect to meet odd people.