Cathy had started down the trail.
"This time," Cathy said now, "I left a note for Aunt Sarah. She's a good lady. No use worrying her unnecessarily."
"Maybe you shouldn't have done that," Maria said.
"Left a note? Why not?"
Maria didn't know why not; she couldn't say, and only gestured vaguely. But somehow the thought of Cathy's note made her uneasy.
"You see," said Cathy, "going down the first time, I mean at Thanksgiving, that was a lot different. I didn't really know where I was headed, then. I only had a kind of memory." She paused. "Do you ever have—dreams—about your early childhood?"
"Not any more," Maria said.
"Memories, I should say. More like memories than dreams. Going down that time was like a dream. I saw things, real things, that I had convinced myself were only figments of my imagination. Like a certain little house. Seeing that house scared me, so I just—went camping for a while. Now I've got to go back and make sure about things, like that house, and my parents. I…" Cathy did not seem to be able to find words to complete the thought.
"You work with Mr. Strangeways?" she asked finally. "No," said Maria, in her new vague, indifferent voice. "Not really. I've barely met him. Why?"
"There's something spooky about him."
"I think you're probably right about that." The two young women trudged on down the trail.
They had gone no more than fifty yards when Cathy noticed that Maria was carrying nothing—not even a canteen—in the way of camping supplies or equipment.
"Aren't you going to need anything?"
"No. I'm not really—going that far." Maria was staring straight ahead of her, as if she were thinking very intently indeed. Cathy almost hesitated to interrupt such concentration.
"You're following me, right? Checking up on me? So how do you know how far I'm going?"
Maria shrugged.
"Well, you're all right." Cathy shook her head, tossing her hair. "You're not going to need a canteen, because it isn't very far."
"How do we get there?"
"You have to know a secret. But that's all right, I remember the secret. Or else I'm crazy, and I've only been imagining things all along."
"What kind of secret?"
"It's a trick my father—the man who must have been my real father—taught me when I was very small. For a long time I forgot it; but once you learn something important like that, it's never quite forgotten. You know what I mean? Like riding a bicycle."
Maria didn't answer. She was still gazing straight ahead of her as she walked, as if her thoughts were really elsewhere.
Snow blew in the faces of the two young women, and flurries obscured the trail, above them and below. The mule train, mounting methodically, led by a mounted ranger, came into view once more, this time immediately ahead. Cathy and Maria moved as far as possible to the inside edge of the trail, letting the big, sure-footed animals walk past, each carrying a half-frozen tourist. The mounted men and women, at this stage of their adventure intent on getting back to warmth and civilization, scarcely glanced at the waiting hikers.
The trick that Cathy had mentioned, of course, was a technique required of any traveler bound in or out of the place her parents had called the Deep Canyon. The proper technique was essential, not only to pass the barrier of time, but to arrive on the other side of that barrier somewhere near your chosen destination. It was of course necessary that the destination had been rightly chosen—and for Cathy, as she herself now thought, this journey of exploration, of rediscovery, was not only right, but inevitable.
She tried, without much success, to discuss all these things with Maria, as the two young women continued walking down Bright Angel Trail together.
Maria at last paid enough attention to say: "It's all new to me down here. You'll have to show me."
"Oh, I can show you easily enough. When I was a little girl, I came down this way more times than I can remember—than I could remember. But now I'm here again, it's all coming back."
Now the two were alone, cut off on all sides by the falling snow that had driven other visitors to cover. Cathy as she descended the trail pondered yet again the questions of her own origins: Who had her real mother been? Somehow she was almost entirely certain that her real mother, whatever her identity, had been dead for a long time. And who, really, was the man that she rememberedas the father of her childhood?
Gradually, in the course of growing up as Brainard's adopted daughter, Cathy had come to realize that her adoption had made her a relative of old Edgar Tyrrell, an important but vastly eccentric artist who in the dim past of the thirties had built the Tyrrell House, among his other achievements. But until very recently Tyrrell and his ancient affairs had never loomed large in Cathy Brainard's thoughts. She had never had any cause to connect the half-famous artist, whose name appeared on statues, in books, and in museums, with the vague memory she nursed of her 'real' father. The dates were just hopelessly wrong, to begin with.
Nor, until Cathy arrived by chance at the Canyon this year, at the age of seventeen, had she ever had any reason, or any desire, to visit the house on the South Rim.
Cathy was vaguely aware that her adoptive father sometimes visited the Canyon on business trips—though Brainard seldom discussed business in front of her. But people at home almost never talked about the Tyrrell House in her presence, and she had had no idea that she had ever been there before.
Until she saw the place. Then, at first glance, she was certain that it had once been her home.
Cathy, absorbed in thought, almost passed up the turning when they reached it, almost missed the proper place to work the trick. But she did recognize the place in time, despite the snow. The two young women turned off Bright Angel, following what looked like a deer trail, leading nowhere. But Cathy made the turnoff without hesitation.
In Cathy's awareness there had been floating the memory of certain old photographs of Edgar Tyrrell, pictures she had come across from time to time, in magazines or books. She was certain of having seen at least one such photo, framed, in the Rim House, and it seemed to her there had been another in one of the Canyon guidebooks she and her girlfriends had seen in the early stage of her Thanksgiving visit, in their room at one of the lodges.
And at Aunt Sarah's home on Long Island, Cathy knew, the old lady still kept one or two such photos, black and white, taken with a boxy old thirties camera. On rainy childhood afternoons young Cathy, browsing through a past in which she had never thought to find herself a native, had come across those pictures more than once. Somehow those pictures had become confused—or so she had long thought—with her real memories, of a real man she once had called her father.
The snow inside the Canyon stopped falling, and the air warmed. The sky remained cloudy, but the quality of light changed, suggesting dusk in the Deep Canyon, but no longer suggesting winter. Visibility increased.
"Yes, this is the place," said Cathy quietly. They were in some kind of a side canyon now, vastly smaller than the big one. A creek, narrow enough to step across, came gurgling down the middle. The narrow trail, or path, generally following the creek, took the young women in single file around some dwarfish cottonwoods. They had arrived in sight of the cottage, which stood only fifty yards or so ahead. Its windows were lightless, and the whole place looked uninhabited and uninviting.
Cathy stopped in her tracks, gazing at the little structure. Maria halted uncertainly beside her.
"I lived in that house once," Cathy said. "Not for very long, I think. But I did live there."