"I do not come in peace, or in friendship."
"Then let your fate be on your own head, Drakulya." Tyrrell's image glowed and wavered. He dropped Maria's hand, and she began to edge away from him.
Tyrrell's voice boomed out. "You see, I need fear the sun no longer," he proclaimed. "I am no longer nosferatu." And with that he disappeared—
—to be replaced by a green-eyed young man. "I am no longer a mere breather," this one said. And in turn vanished—
—to be replaced by the red-haired young woman, whose lips moved but whose words could not be heard. And then replaced by one older human figure, and another, their faces and outlines blurred, so that no one could see what they might have looked like in full life.
—and, when his turn in the cycle came round again, Tyrrell was back.
He said: "This is our planet's life that dances before you, Drakulya. It was madness on my part to think that I could ever capture the essence of earth's life in a carved rock—"
Drakulya's voice rang out. "Tyrrell, if you have still enough of your mind left to understand, hear me. What you have done is madness. The madness of the artist is allowable, even necessary. But you have gone beyond that. Human lives, not only your own, have been destroyed. The damage you have done to the planet's spirit must be undone."
"Human lives?" The artist was scornful. "What are they? What is any human life, even yours or mine, compared to this?"
"Speaking as a human, I consider my own life a very great thing indeed."
Drakulya had done with arguing. He spread his arms, and murmured magic.
To Joe Keogh, standing by with Brainard's pistol ready, the language sounded something like simple German. But he knew it must be more than that.
Suddenly, the ground of the Deep Canyon quivered underneath Joe's feet. Others were feeling a great change too; uneasiness spread among the group.
"Hello. I'm Jake."
Tyrrell was gone again. Now the creature showed the face of the green-eyed young man, whoever he had been in life. It called itself by Jake's name, and then once more by Camilla's.
Camilla and Jake appeared in rapid alternation, each of them calling for the other. For a brief time their voices sounded desperate.
Then the young man, whose cheerfulness seemed to have been fully recovered, held the stage again. "This is Jake, everybody. We're going to be friends."
Maria had been slowly making her way to join her rescuers. Like most of them, she watched in awe and fear.
Drakulya's arms were still extended, his lips still murmured words.
The creature was visibly beginning to dissolve under the magical assault—the powers of the earth, Joe thought, were re-ordering themselves. Sequentially the thing of light disgorged a number of animals. Joe could recognize bears and deer. His mind recoiled from less familiar shapes.
Tyrrell had not yet been vanquished. He reappeared again, shouting something to Sarah—Joe could not understand the words. He called his daughter's name for a last time.
Cathy did not seem to hear. Her full attention was somewhere else.
"I need tools, physical tools," Drakulya cried to her, and to Sarah. "Where are they kept?"
"The workshop!"
Willing young feet dashed away. Young hands were soon back, laden with heavy, mundane miner's tools.
"Those are my tools!" screamed the wraith of Jake, looming amid boiling light.
Drakulya grabbed up a miner's pick.
The man who had been called Strangeways struck at the ground with iron, using all his strength. The tormented earth buckled up, sending people staggering, exposing a sharply demarcated seam between two layers of rock.
"The Great Unconformity," murmured Sarah.
The seam writhed in the earth, as if it sought to position itself below the creature. The being, the thing, the structure of light, was beginning to unravel. In a startlingly brief time it was gone.
The ground beneath the feet of the survivors ceased to heave convulsively. Instead it was bending, as if a hollowness were under it. The strata of rocks, no longer hard and dense, were stretching, changing uncontrollably.
"Back, get back!" Drakulya had abandoned magic and was shouting at his friends. "Withdraw, retreat uphill!"
Joe was still half-crippled, but with the adrenaline flowing and John Southerland's strong shoulder offering support he could force himself to run uphill, through a rapidly altering landscape, out of the Deep Canyon. Drakulya ran beside him, carrying Sarah, with Cathy hovering nearby. Others were running on their own power, under a sky that suddenly and repeatedly changed its cloud-configuration and modified its light.
Bill Burdon, feeling safe enough to turn for a look back, beheld a churning, upswelling mass of light and shadow, tones reversed as in a photographic negative, rapidly, silently, filling in the depths from which they had just climbed. He cried out in alarm: "Is that lava?"
Their leader grunted: "No, only energy, but quite as dangerous. Stay ahead of it!"
Rushing and scrambling, the visitors from the late twentieth century did their best to accomplish that.
At last the rocky ground regained stability. Around them, mundane snow began to fall.
Chapter 20
The time on the South Rim was either shortly before, or shortly after midnight, on the last day of the old year—or else on the first of the new. After a day like the one he had just been through, Joe Keogh, now more or less collapsed in his room at El Tovar with his sore leg up on cushions, was not entirely sure which.
Nor could he convince himself that it really mattered.
Just across the room John Southerland was on the phone, completing a long-distance call to Angie back in Chicago, assuring her that the day's dangerous business had been brought to a conclusion that was, by and large, acceptable if not entirely satisfactory. Only minutes ago Joe himself had finished a similar call to his own wife.
Not very far outside the door of Joe's suite, no farther away than the hotel lounge, appropriate holiday music was being played—just now Auld Lang Syne, at holiday volume.
Tonight Mr. Strangeways and his companions were doing most of their celebrating within the solid log walls of El Tovar, but occasionally their party, or a strong contingent of it anyway, sallied forth onto the South Rim. Sometimes the strollers got as far as the Tyrrell House where Cathy and her mother were established, though they never strayed beyond shouting distance of the old hotel.
Whenever any celebrants from the hotel walked out on the Rim, to one of the places along the very brink where they could turn their backs on the streetlights along the tourist walk, they found themselves confronted by the full company of the wintry stars, and by the vast imperturbable black midnight that was the Canyon.
In the middle of one such sortie Maria Torres said to her nearest companion: "It's a little frightening." Then she almost laughed at herself. "It must sound silly to say that, after today. After what almost happened to us all. But I mean it anyway."
Maria was recovering very nicely. In fact, thanks to certain subtle ministrations performed by Mr. Strangeways, she no longer had any very clear memory of what had happened to her personally—or what had almost happened—only a few hours ago, down below.
Now she frowned lightly at the Canyon's darkness. "But… it's not like me to blank out."
"Might happen once to anyone. I wouldn't worry about it." John, who had been ready to walk outside after making his phone call, was being as reassuringly avuncular as possible, given the slight disparity in ages.
"I suppose you're right." Maria sounded doubtful.
"Take my word for it." John sipped from his can of beer. "What did you mean just now, when you said something is a little frightening?"