A Question Of Time Read online

  * * *

  There was another faint sound, this time from the direction of the house. A moment later, Bill saw and heard Joe reemerge from his conference, descending the wooden ladder. After waving silently in the direction of Bill, whose shadowed and motionless form was probably invisible to him, Joe Keogh returned to his own post on the other side of the faint descending path.

  A minute later, another faint noise came, downslope somewhere—to Bill this one sounded like an owl. Trying to pierce the darkness with his vision, Bill noticed that the fog had now sunk deeper into the Canyon, so that an eerie moonlit landscape fell away from him on a steep overall descent. The moonlight was just bright enough to suggest the overall outline of the fantastic terrain, while leaving almost everything but the largest features to the imagination. Bill had identified the deer at a distance of thirty yards, but much beyond that he thought it would be impossible to distinguish animal from human.

  He hoped that the remaining high clouds were going to let the moon—tonight not quite half full—show him a good deal more of the Canyon. But so far the visibility hadn’t yet improved enough to give grounds for real hope along those lines.

  Time passed.

  Bill was wearing a watch, but he couldn’t see the dial in the dark, and he wasn’t about to use his flashlight for that purpose. The movement of the moon across the sky would let him estimate time’s passage accurately enough to satisfy his own curiosity.

  Another hour or so had passed, and it was beginning to seem to Bill, at least, that things were likely to remain quiet all night, when the next sound came. This time it came from the direction of the house, and this time there was no doubt that it meant trouble.

  * * *

  A crash of glass was blended with yells in several different voices. Then Bill heard heavier impacts, like a hammer pounding on boards or logs. Additional shouts and bangings followed.

  In the midst of the uproar there sounded a single gunshot.

  Looking toward the house, shrouded as it was in gloom except for faint lamplight at a couple of windows, Bill could see nothing out of the ordinary.

  For the moment, not seeing anything else to do, he stood his ground.

  * * *

  Maria, who had been still faithfully keeping the client company, saw a moving light behind the window curtain. Then in the next moment the light—it had to be only some kind of strange reflection—was actually in the room with her.

  Old Sarah, who a moment ago had been asleep, was sitting bolt upright in her bed.

  Maria saw—and then forgot that she had seen—the figure of a man, standing close in front of her. And then, for the time being, she saw and heard no more.

  * * *

  Joe Keogh, when the uproar broke upon the quiet night, started to rush for the ladder to get back up into the house, but then remembered that the trapdoor should still be locked or latched on the inside. Slowly he retreated to his original position, watching and listening.

  * * *

  Bill stood for a long moment indecisive, half in and half out of moonlight now, on the verge of charging back up to the house, in the name of doing something. But then the thought of the locked trapdoor passed through Bill’s mind as it had through Joe’s. Followed by the sudden suspicion that all this noise might be meant as a distraction, to draw him away from the place where he had been posted.

  But before this state of indecision had endured for more than a second or two, Bill’s attention was drawn from the house, by the sight of first one strange figure and then another, striding downhill as if they had just come from Tyrrell’s old dwelling. Both figures were moving so swiftly and unexpectedly that both were past Bill before he could react in any purposeful way.

  A moment later Bill, reacting instinctively, had started in pursuit. Pulling out his flashlight, he turned it on, and in the same instant cried out for the two to halt. His shout had no visible effect.

  Even in the excitement of the moment it struck him as unsettling that his quarry, the figures of someone—or something—at least generally, vaguely human—were eerily not really running, but rather striding away from him, moving at the speed of runners, gliding downhill, departing untouched into the invisible depths of the Canyon.

  They were escaping, scot free, after making a mockery of Bill’s and his colleagues’ efforts to protect their client.

  Worse than defeat was insult. There was something indefinably daunting about the figures Bill had glimpsed—about that first one in particular—but he was a brave young man and did not hesitate, at least not more than momentarily, to pursue.

  His flashlight now failed to reveal anything of the foremost figure that fled from him down the slope—that appeared to have already vanished—but the beam afforded him one fairly clear look at the rearmost, who had paused momentarily. In Bill’s sight this took the form of a man, a total stranger as far as he could tell—gray-haired, and dressed in gray work clothing. Bill yelled at this man to halt.

  The gray-haired man paid not the least attention, but strode on, resuming his effortless Olympic pace.

  Bill, running now at something like full speed, started to give chase in earnest.

  * * * * * *

  Joe Keogh had been able to catch only a fleeting glimpse of the same two figures. To him they were much more ominous, but in the next moment he saw something that scared him more—Bill, plunging heedlessly down the trail after them.

  Joe yelled for Bill to stop.

  If Bill heard Joe’s command, he paid no more attention to it than Bill’s quarry had to his.

  Joe, drawing in breath to yell again, started in full-speed pursuit also.

  But before he could shout Bill’s name a second time, or had run more than a few yards, Joe tripped and stumbled on the rough and unfamiliar trail. A numbing shock shot through his ankle, sudden forewarning of agony about to come. Joe fell, hardly aware of the impact of rock and dirt beneath his hands, scraping palms and fingers painfully on tough brush and unyielding rock.

  Heedlessly wasting what little breath he still retained on useless oaths, Joe struggled to his feet and tried to resume his run. One attempted step on his right leg was all he needed to convince him that he was through running for the night. He collapsed again, with a groan of pain.

  * * *

  Meanwhile John Southerland, dutifully holding his assigned post at the front of the house, heard some disturbance inside, or, as he thought, at the rear. There was a crash of glass and other violent noise, accompanied by yells in several voices.

  John crouched slightly, alternating his attention between the house and the approaches to it, from which the last tourist had disappeared more than an hour ago. He refused to let himself be drawn away from his post, on the chance that the disturbance was

  really a planned distraction.

  * * * * * *

  Gradually Maria became aware that Gerald Brainard, trembling and muttering, carrying a heavy revolver in hand, was standing beside her chair, in the room next to where old Sarah was still sitting upright in the bed.

  “They’re gone now. It’s all over,” said Brainard in a husky voice. Maria thought that he looked curiously relieved.

  Maria’s radio was buzzing on the little table beside her chair, and she groped to answer it.

  Outside, Joe, sitting helplessly on the ground, was using his own radio to call repeatedly for help.

  John Southerland, getting the call, at last did leave his post, moving decisively. With flashlight in hand he went running around the house and downhill to the place from which Joe was calling for help.

  John relaxed somewhat when the beam of his flashlight showed him his brother-in-law sitting on a rock, swearing too loudly for a man with mortal injury.

  “Help me up, goddam it!”

  “Where you hurt?”

  “My ankle.”

  John grabbed the older man under the arms and hoisted. “Where’s Bill?” he asked, looking around.

  “Went chasing off downhill
like a damn fool.” Joe balanced on one foot, leaning half his weight on John’s shoulder. “After those … I tried to stop him—no, don’t you go running after him.”

  “He went chasing after…?” John didn’t complete the question; he could already read the answer in Joe’s frightened eyes.

  For the next couple of minutes they both tried, with no success, to get Bill on the radio.

  “Help me back to the house,” Joe growled at last. “What’s going on in there?”

  “I haven’t looked. Maria sounded like she had things under control—still there, Maria?”

  “Still here,” her voice responded after a moment. “If you guys are coming in I’ll open the trapdoor.”

  Getting the injured man up the ladder was difficult, but with Maria tugging from above and John pushing from below the task proved not impossible. Joe’s adrenaline was up, and his arms were strong enough to hoist his weight repeatedly.

  Brainard and Sarah came to meet the investigators in the lowest level of the house.

  Of those present, no one but Joe had been hurt.

  “Did I hear shots?” he demanded.

  No one answered that directly.

  “I thought I heard one,” said Maria. “And Mr. Brainard here was carrying a pistol. Also there’s a small hole in one of the windows.”

  “All right, we’ll deal with that later.” For a moment Joe stared at Brainard, who looked back numbly. “Maria, try again to get Bill on the radio. John, get me up the stairway to the main floor, can you?”

  While John was helping the boss upstairs, Maria tried her radio repeatedly. “This is the house,” she kept saying. “Bill, is that you? Come in.”

  Only noise responded.

  Joe, hobbling now through the middle level of the house, leaning on furniture, muttered something to the effect that the radios were expensive junk.

  “They always worked great before,” John commented.

  And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Bill’s voice was coming clearly through the little unit in Maria’s hand. Some of the words were unclear, half-drowned in noise, but the burden of Bill’s message seemed to be that he had managed to get himself lost, or at least bewildered; he was going to have to sit tight until daylight.

  Joe, at the head of a stairway, looking down at Maria at the foot, let out a sigh of relief. He nodded at her.

  “Sit tight, then,” she told Bill. “Anything you need?”

  Bill did not answer. Joe shook his head and muttered.

  * * *

  Maria was left with the puzzling feeling that she had fainted during the excitement; but no, she couldn’t have done that. She had been sleeping when it started, that was it. Noise had awakened her, and lights at the windows, and then … Brainard, standing over her with gun in hand.

  She had the nagging feeling that there had been something else. But just exactly what …

  Neither the client nor her nephew, thought Maria, puzzling, were as outraged as she would have expected clients to be under the circumstances. At first old Sarah had been, naturally enough, somewhat stunned by the intrusion, but now she appeared much calmer. Neither she nor Brainard wanted to call in the Park Rangers, who served as the first line of police here on this federal land. She, Maria, would certainly have been outraged if she had hired a private security force at great expense, and her new employees had failed her dismally within a few hours of going on the job.

  Joe established himself for the time being in a chair on the highest level of the house. Maria suggested tentatively that she and John try searching downhill for Bill in darkness; or they could at least try shining flashlights in that direction, so their missing colleague might have a beacon that could guide him home.

  Joe fiercely forbade any attempt to search, and proclaimed it his opinion that shining lights anywhere would be a waste of time.

  “But there’s no use his just sitting there on a rock all night if he doesn’t have to. If we could just show a bright light—”

  “Sit down and shut up.” Joe Keogh’s gaze for once was icy. “I know what I’m doing. I’m not sending any more people down that hill tonight. Our client is up here.”

  “Okay.” And Maria wondered silently why the boss was so vehement. Well, some people got that way after they had screwed things up.

  All of them gradually became aware that Brainard seemed much more at ease now than he had been before the mysterious visitation. Now he was going out of his way to be friendly with the hired investigators, offering to get them coffee or hot chocolate from the kitchen.

  Sarah Tyrrell on the other hand, after a few minutes of apparently peaceful contemplation, had resumed worrying. She had retreated to her bedroom, where she sat in a rocker, tense, staring into space, saying little. The old lady seemed still to welcome the presence of Maria, who tried to comfort her.

  * * *

  John and Joe also remained in the Tyrrell House for another couple of hours. The two men took turns, one dozing in a chair while the other remained awake, listening for any further radio communication from Bill. A light was kept burning in one of the northern windows of the house.

  But Bill’s radio remained silent, despite the fact that they tried several times to call him back.

  Chapter Six

  Numbly Jake followed Camilla uphill through heavily gathering darkness, treading the path beside the nameless little stream whose voices chanted only nonsense. She was leading him back, Jake knew, to the place where the side canyon widened into a kind of amphitheater. Back to the neat little house standing not far from the strange cave.

  Jake’s companion led the way in silence, now and then pausing to look over her shoulder at him, as if she wanted to make sure he was still with her.

  In a few minutes they were standing once again in front of the small log house, whose neat windows showed no lights behind their curtains. There was plenty of light in another place, forty or fifty yards away, at the foot of one of the surrounding cliffs. An electric glare poured from the cave’s low entrance, as wide as a garage door. The glare was growing steadily brighter and brighter against the coming night. The generator, whose housing was now invisible in the background dusk, droned on as before, making noise that was barely perceptible through the voice of the waterfall. Nearer at hand, intermittent clinking and hammering sounds from the direction of the cave indicated that the old man must be still at his labors, though for the moment at least he was out of sight.

  Jake jerked his head in that direction. “You say old Edgar is to blame for my troubles. He’s the one who can show me the way out of here. The one who can let me go.”

  Camilla bobbed her head, and whispered, as if she feared old Edgar might hear her even against the noises of the generator, and the stream, and the racket he himself was making. “He can. He could. But—”

  Jake had already turned his back on her, starting toward the place where the old man banged fanatically on rock. Camilla grabbed Jake by the arm.

  “No!” she whispered fiercely. “Don’t mess with him tonight. Not while he’s working. Stay with me tonight, and—and get some rest. You don’t want to try to walk back to your camp tonight anyway. Tomorrow you can talk to Edgar. That’ll be plenty time enough.”

  Jake hesitated. The truth was that he did feel as if he’d hiked a hundred miles today. He was almost swaying on his feet.

  “Come get some rest,” Camilla coaxed him again. “And I’ll fix you something to eat.”

  Giving up for the time being on the idea of a confrontation, Jake let her lead him to the little house, where she held open the neat screen door for him to enter. Despite all the strangeness that engulfed him, and his weariness, Jake retained enough capacity for surprise to notice how nicely the place was fixed up inside. He thought it could almost be in the middle of a suburb somewhere instead of here in the wilderness.

  It was a really small house, not a shack. Camilla after opening a couple of windows clicked a wall switch and an electric lamp came on, revealing the mai
n room, furnished with rustic chairs and tables. A large, new-looking rug covered much of the floor of broad planks. Under the windows at one side was a kitchen sink, complete with faucets—indoor plumbing was more than anyone had back at the CCC camp.

  Crossing this main chamber, Camilla led Jake to a door that opened into what seemed to be the only bedroom. There she gestured for him to sit down on the only bed. Another door on the far side of the bedroom remained closed. Maybe, he wondered, a real bathroom?

  Sitting on the bed, which softly squeaked beneath his weight, Jake looked around him. An ordinary dresser, with drawers. No mirror on the dresser, or anywhere else. Several pictures decorated the whitewashed walls.

  He asked: “Where’s the old man sleep? What time does he turn in?”

  “Don’t worry about him,” Camilla assured him positively. Bustling about almost maternally, she fluffed pillows and turned down covers. “He won’t turn in till dawn, and he never comes in the house.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “No. You can go to sleep.”

  Sleep was tempting, but for the moment Jake just sat stupidly, watching a mouse scamper along the neat baseboard right in front of him. He felt too tired to think.

  Camilla had retreated briskly to the main room, where she struck a match and was now kindling some kind of brighter flame with it. In a few moments she re-entered the bedroom and set down a lighted kerosene lamp on the small table.

  “No electric light in this room,” she explained apologetically. Now, with more light, Jake could see stains on the neat whitewashing of one wall, up near the ceiling, as if a roof leak had been neglected.

  “Are you hungry?” Camilla was asking him.