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, staring 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 Jake to take it easy on her.
"Tomorrow morning, then," said Jake at last. "As soon as the sun is up."
"Tomorrow morning," Camilla agreed, in a whisper.
Jake walked alone, thinking to himself. He still trusted Camilla because he had to, even though she was no longer always the same person. He trusted her—but not entirely—because he had no choice.
Jake sat hollow-eyed beside the canyon's stream, listening to its voices. Telling himself he was trying to listen, but he thought that really he was maybe trying not to hear. There were exhortations to murder in the voices, and even stranger commands, that he had trouble understanding, and dared not wholly acknowledge even to himself.
Tyrrell, working that evening in the cave with Jake, informed his prisoner that, according to mundane science, only very simple fossils were known to occur naturally in the deepest life-bearing rock down here, a layer of schist whose formation lay beyond an unimaginable gulf of time. Below those simple relics, the layers of lifeless Precambrian rock stretched back an enormously greater distance toward eternity.
"Are you capable of imagining even a million years, Rezner?" asked Tyrrell, as the two men paused in the midst of their labors on the deep rock.
"Why not? Anyway, I don't have to imagine. I've already seen stranger things, since I met you."
Chapter 15
On leaving Sarah Tyrrell, Drakulya walked back to El Tovar, intending to consult once more with Joe Keogh, and also to ask some questions of the adoptive father of the missing girl.
Brainard, still lying low in Joe Keogh's suite, was made uneasy by the way Mr. Strangeways looked at him. Brainard in fact impressed his caller as a man who would dearly love to become invisible.
Under steady scrutiny, Brainard looked from Joe to Strangeways and back again. Then he ventured:
"You're maybe—a friend of Mr. Tyrrell's?"
Strangeways shook his head. "I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting him. We do share a certain background, however."
Brainard nodded slowly. "I thought so. So maybe you'll be able to find my daughter?"
"As I have told your aunt, I will do what I can to help her. First, I would like you to tell me all you can about Tyrrell."
Brainard fumbled through several pockets before he found his cigarettes. "That won't be much. He's alive, down there somewhere, as far as I know. I haven't seen him for a long time. And I've been doing business with him over the years. Honest business. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?"
Another question elicited the information that Brainard himself had never been down into the Canyon, not even the most mundane modern version of the place, and he seemed to have no clear idea that a Canyon of any other time or shape might be accessible. He had never even set foot on the main trails that descended from near the Village and whose upper portions at least were trampled daily by a thousand tourists. He was not expert or even interested in the out-of-doors. In fact, Brainard seemed to think it believable that a man had been hiding out for sixty years, in some sanctuary accessible without magic or its equivalent in science, within a mile or two of the swarming tourist activity on the South Rim.